Visitation
by Mercurial Weather
Summary: Wert thou even from the grave ascended, I could warm thee well with my desire. Inspired by Goethe's poem Bride of Corinth Lily visits Snape as a vengeful lilitu (succubus) in a series of one shots during the HP books timeline
1. Chapter 1

Visitation

"'_Love! thy mantle not with passion's glow,  
Thou wouldst be afraid,_

_Didst thou find the maid  
Thou hast chosen, cold as ice or snow.'_

_Round her waist his eager arms he bended,  
With the strength that youth and love inspire;_

'_Wert thou even from the grave ascended,  
__I could warm thee well with my desire!'"__ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (The Bride of Corinth published in Die Horen in 1797.)._

_AN: I like to do series of one shots that revolve around a central theme, but can be read independently. It allows me to come back to them from time to time without pressure. I left the genre as general because I couldn't decide which fit the fic best. It may lay somewhere between horror and romance though where exactly I don't know. I have Lily visit Snape as a vengeful lilitu over the course of the HP books timeline. That being said, other than a spot of funereal sex in the first chapter and subsequent visits by undead Lily to Severus, the fic may not be graphic enough to warrant an M rating. __Is it just me? Don't you find ratings specious? Anything designed to serve the lowest common denominator usually does a disservice to the majority of people.__ But at the same time I do understand the concerns that give raise to ratings. So I'm using M to be on the safe side._

Chapter I: The Luminous Past

_You can never go back home, home won't remain the same and neither will you, time is like the tide that washes even the rock off the cliff, _Severus Snape reflected despondently, as he laid sleepless on his four posted bed. He was over the covers and he hadn't bothered changing into his sleeping gown; for if the past couple of months were good predictors of how things were going to go, he wasn't going to get much sleep. Ever since joining the teaching staff he had been staying awake most of the night, until exhaustion claimed him when the dawn was about to break. He hadn't slept more than a couple of hours a day since he had moved back to Hogwarts.

He scoffed inwardly. There was no point in lying to himself. He had always suffered from insomnia and had barely slept since that night. There is no rest for the wicked, his father would have said and, for once, Tobias Snape would have been right. The only reason he had gotten any sleep or food after what had happened last October was because he forced his body to sleep and eat as a matter of discipline. Immediately afterwards he had been in shambles, drinking _Lethe serum_ almost as fast as he could brew it. He had wanted to pass in stupor the hours until the Aurors finally came for him. The nights were the worst, he had drowsed them away in a semi hypnotic state, soaked in the potion, until the light of the sun invaded the house and he had to get up to close the curtains. That is how Albus Dumbledore had found him, the pitiable dregs of a man lying on the floor of the house in Spinner's End.

The Headmaster had doused him in a bucketful of ice cold water and made him stand up with two unforgiving flickers of his wand. And while Severus tried to decide if he'd rather die in a duel with the alleged greatest wizard of the world or waste away with the Dementors in Azkaban, the old wizard had handed him a blanket, a cup of hot tea and had offered him a teaching position as Potions Master in Hogwarts. Then he had helped him clean the house and pack up his things blabbering cheerfully all the time about how keeping a healthy routine could help you overcome pretty much anything, even a broken heart. It is all a matter of discipline, Dumbledore had said and he had pointed out with a wink that he was talking from experience. Severus Snape had been too in shock to do anything else but follow his lead. Turns out that after twenty one harsh years in which he had figured he'd experienced every form of disillusionment possible, he could still be surprised by people.

He wondered if Dumbledore, who now insisted he called him Albus, was even a little bit surprised by his acquiescence. If he wasn't, Severus sure was, he had been certain he had nothing left to live for. And the only reason why he hadn't gone to the old mill, picked up a handful of castor bean seeds, synthesized some ricin in his lab and injected himself with a deathly dose of it, was that after spending most of his young life surviving through hell, he wasn't ready to concede defeat. After years of unfulfilled dreams, this simply couldn't be the breadth of his life. In her dying bed he had promised his mother that he would make someone of himself, he was not ready to break the promise made to the only person who'd ever believed in him.

The other teachers had been unpleasantly surprised by the latest addition to the faculty. They were less than happy to have a former Death Eater replace beloved Professor Slughorn, who had retired rather hurriedly by the end of the war, both as Potions Master and Head of Slitheryn. And most of them were vocal about it, even if few dared say anything outright insulting to his face. The students were not too happy either, but they had to make do with someone they saw, under the best light, as a parvenu. Fortunately Severus Snape had ample experience handling scorn.

He had no trouble teaching his students and colleagues to keep their opinions and, more importantly, their behavior, under the strictest boundaries of politeness required by civilized society. They didn't have to like him, but he'd be damned, young as he was, if he would allow them to disrespect him. Since they were not willing to let him go of the past, he wasn't going to let them forget it either. You don't become the right hand of Voldemort at twenty one by being congenial.

The Ministry was not at all thrilled to have one of Voldermort's Lieutenants roaming free either. Whenever he stepped out of the school's grounds he was followed by an incompetent detail of Aurors. He found their attempts at remaining concealed pathetic, of course the way these poor boys had learned Defense against the Dark Arts was so appalling that what else could be expected of them? These people didn't believe in learning the arts they were trying to fight. It was disheartening to think that these poor saps were the finest of the lot, or at least the finest left after the war purged both the crème of the Aurors and Death Eaters alike. So many bright young people had perished. Thinking about it depressed him so much that he had taken to remain within the school grounds, even during the weekends.

The castle was almost empty due to the winter break, save for those who like Severus didn't have a reason to go back home for celebrating the holidays. There were also those who no longer had a home to go back to. He had offered to look after the students that remained because he really didn't want to go back to the empty house in Spinner's End, the place was too full with memories of his mother and of her to be safe for him, at least for the time being.

He wondered if he'd ever feel at home again. Once upon a time he had felt more comfortable in Hogwarts School of Magic than anywhere else in the world. He remembered keenly the rush of enthusiasm as he rode in the train; how nervous he had been during the sorting ceremony and the sense of triumph at having been sorted into his dream house: Slytherin. He did it! He made it into the same house as Merlin! The icing on the cake? He had been given his own room in the bottom of the Slytherin basement, right beneath a porthole window, overlooking an algae forest that the grindylows used as nursery for their grypts.

Most people were weary of being near the ferocious Black Lake dwellers, even behind magical glass. The little beasts were prone to crash into the porthole mouthing watery screeches and flaying their tentacles furiously, when people were trying to study or sleep. But after eleven years living with his father, Severus had learned the hard way how to blend in with the wallpaper. He only cast the softest light, always in the green spectrum, and moved in the silent way that even his mum called sneaky. So grindylows went about their business without much minding him and there was something so calming in watching the mum grindylows tending to their larvae by the eerie glow of the bottommost denizens of the lake. By the end of his first week he had already seen marvelous creatures that usually only went out when the Slitheryn basement had grown quiet past midnight. It made him feel like he was a denizen of the depths himself. It even helped with his insomnia as looking at the comings and goings of the water creatures was better than any sleeping draught he'd tried.

His first room in Hogwarts was little more than a broom closet. It could barely fit a bed and a desk. But that was fine by him, he had suffered from insomnia even as a toddler and when he did sleep, he did it with an eye open. Daddykins had the ugly tendency of waking up the household in the dead of night to impart what he called "life lessons" when he got pissed blind in the pub. When that happened it was wise not to be around. He had developed a sixth sense and he usually woke up as soon as his father turned the key in the lock. He had learned to recognize the angry storm was coming by the sound the man's feet made in the linoleum as he made his drunken way inside their little home. Severus had also learned to move without making a noise and, when they were lucky, he was able to wake up his mum and they left through the window in the kitchen without the man noticing. He had lost count of the nights they had spent by the murky riverbank with him cowering in his mum's arms until the snores inside the house told them it was safe to go back in.

The house in Spinner's End only had one bedroom that his parents had shared, he had slept in a foldup bed in the parlor. So Severus was used to make do without much space, besides, he used the room at school mostly as a scriptorium. But nothing could dampen the joy of having a room to himself for the first time in his life. He had loved the underwater view, the privacy and the quiet, for the room he was assigned was a fair distance away from the common room.

Eleven year old Severus even enjoyed the irony that he had only been given the luxury of private sleeping quarters because most of his classmates were weary of sleeping in the same room with a half-blood. They treated him as if he were contagious. For most Slytherins it didn't matter his mother, Eileen Prince, was a pure blood witch. For them Severus Snape was the son of his Muggle father. And the children in his house were not going to let him forget, regardless of what the sorting hat thought, that mudbloods weren't real Slytherins.

It didn't help that his uniform was second hand, his trunk and school books were a family heirloom thrice his age and his hair was always greasy. That was the result of an unfortunate accident. He had been trying to brew a universal solvent potion capable of dissolving even non polar molecules. He had found the formula in a loose leaf inside Grandfather Prince's Tibetan Alchemy Manual, it was signed Green Lion Prince, another name of iron sulfate and grandpa's surname. Snape had been so enthralled by having found the secret of brewing what Paracelsus had called Alkahest that he had foolishly forgotten to adapt it considering the effects of atmospheric pressure on the boiling point.

It had been an unforgivable mistake. For Merlin's sake: what self-respecting alchemist doesn't know that liquids change to vapor at the temperature at which the vapor pressure of the liquid is equated to the pressure exerted by the surroundings upon the liquid? Bloody hell, the word pressure is right there in the definition of boiling point. Tibet is known as the roof of the world and all major cities are above 10,000 ft on average. Pressure decreases with altitude and when you are talking about a ten thousand ft difference you must adjust the heating times of your potion. How stupid do you have to be to miss something that obvious?

To this day he felt a surge of anger at himself when he remembered his stupidity. It didn't matter he had only been eleven years old at the time. If you were old enough to play, then you were old enough to pay. You cannot act the adult when it suits you and then go running to your mum when the cauldron blows up in your face. The craft, just like life, is unforgiving. The cauldron didn't care how old little Snape was and it didn't give a damn that he had devoured Clausius and Clapeyron works on heat and thermodynamics written in the 1800s like other children devoured the Sunday's paper cartoons. He had made a mistake and the thing had exploded in a flurry of lard. He should have cast _Defervesco_, but he didn't know the spell back then. His mind froze and he was barely able to cast _Protego_ and _Frigefacio_ with the wand he'd inherited from his grandma. Learning magic with your own wand is tricky, with another person's wand it is even trickier, but they couldn't afford a new one. The shield barely covered his arms, face and chest and he only managed to cool the lard to the point in which it didn't scalp him. Consequence, consequence: Severus was cursed with ever greasy hair.

Well, not really, there were a number of things he could have done to fix his hair; but he had kept the greasy tresses as a reminder that the path of Hermes Trismegistus should only be followed by the patient and the cautious. Some would have thought that the lashing his dad had given him was punishment enough, but he had wanted to give himself a real lesson: There is no room for error on the road to greatness. And as far as what that meant for his social life or lack thereof, back then Severus had embraced the ostracism he was subjected to by the other kids as a sign of his own genius.

Perhaps Tobias Snape was not all that wrong and indeed there was something befitting with carrying the lessons learned as scars on your body. That is also why he had chosen not to try to erase the Death Eaters' mark from his arm. Even if now he only felt ashamed by it, once he had worn it as a mark of pride. He could see the feeble outline of it whenever he pulled his sleeve to clean himself in the Potions' Lab. He knew it made people weary, but it was a reminder of how his life had turned out to be after joining the Death Eaters and, if Dumbledore was right about Tom Riddle being only hurt but not dead, perhaps it could serve as an early alarm system.

He sighed. Who was he trying to fool? He was convinced Dumbledore was right, something not even all of the old wizard's supporters were. His brief stint with _Lethe serum_ hadn't rendered him such big an idiot that he'd miss on the signs. For once, magical tattoos that connote allegiance were supposed to fade after the death of the person to whom the allegiance was pledged to. And the curse on the DADA position in Hogwarts seemed to still be in effect.

The Dark Lord was a very powerful wizard, but not even he could completely escape thermodynamics, magic needs energy to be sustained and even with a very magical substance to power up a spell, once the wizard channeling said energy died, the spell seldom survived for long. Unless it was sustained by other witches and wizards. Take Hogwarts's castle, for example, its magical existence was sustained by its dwellers' belief in the perpetuation of the ancient spell, and since it existed, the belief was in turn perpetuated, closing the circle. That is why the staircases and layout of the castle changed, for with each year new inhabitants were unconsciously casting the spell, breathing new life into the building.

He doubted there was a cabal of loyal Voldemort's followers keeping his spells alive. Those who had survived were either dead, imprisoned or pretending to have been under the _Imperius_ curse. Hence those at liberty to do something were cowards or traitors, so there was no way they were still actively keeping the spells going. He counted himself among the traitors. Though he kept that thought in the innermost part of his mind, where no one else, not even the most gifted _Legilimens_, could find it.

Unlike the very obvious reasons to keep Hogwarts, who would have any interest in sustaining the pettiness of the curse on the DADA position? And the curse was still there, as could be surmised by the string of strange accidents the chap currently in the position had suffered. All of it seemed to point at the Dark Lord still being alive though in a somewhat diminished state. And it all came back to the boy who looked so much like his father, save for his mum's doe like eyes and the lightning bolt scar. The scar that marked the boy's forehead as if he were the protagonist of a tale from the age when magic still ruled over the world.

Severus Snape pushed the troubling thought aside and, instead, allowed himself a little snigger thinking about Professor Ballouhey: A haughty man brought all the way from Beauxbatons. For no English wizard in the know would take the position, so the Board of Governors had no choice but engaging buffoons or foreigners. Snape was still trying to decide which qualifier better befitted the man, though the balance was presently leaning clearly towards one side.

Only a dimwit would chuck up what had been happening to him to mere bad luck. The DADA teacher had nearly chocked on some Streeler trail fumes when what was supposed to be an unbreakable vial had broken for no apparent reason during his class. He had been nearly killed while taking a stroll in the woods by a Manticore that Professor Kettleburn was showing to the seventh graders. Granted, no one was really surprised the beast had escaped the Burnt Kettle's control, for the man wasn't all up there. Even when Snape was a student Kettleburn had the reputation of being a scatterbrain. That seemed to be the standard for magizoologist, the guild attracted the weirdest characters.

It was telling that Ballouhey had only started to suspect something was amiss until he had a nasty bout of food poisoning with a plate of bangers and mash. It took one week for Madame Pomfrey to finally be able to control the man's diarrhea, thanks to the woman's perseverance in finding out the sausages had been infected by a rare magical creature that only exists for a few instants every fifty years and that had chosen precisely the man's plate to lay its eggs. It was a protected magical creature, so they had to be careful to let the parasites grow to a point in which they could be extracted without harming them. Poor man, he had administered the pain calming potions during the procedure and wouldn't wish what Ballouhey had to endure on his worst enemy. The rest of the teachers and the students had eaten the dish with no consequences.

And that was only five months into the school year! He had a bet with Professor Flitwick that Professor Ballouhey wasn't going to come back from the winter break. Flitwick thought the man would show more mettle since the Frenchman had a reputation as a fierce duelist. After conversing with the man during the Christmas banquet, Snape was pretty sure that, whatever the man had been before, the experience had broken him. Severus was surely going to have to cover the man's classes come next January. He had already began to review the syllabus. Being able to teach DADA the proper way would be a nice birthday present for himself.

Thinking of his birthday was a grave mistake. His breathing grew ragged, he began sweating profusely and his heart was beating rapidly against his ribcage. Ever since that cursed night he had been having episodes of panic. He was like an open wound that even the merest brush could make bleed anew. The grappling sense of horror could be triggered by anything, even something as innocent as the fact that she had also celebrated her birthday in January could send him spiraling down. It was not unexpected but still startling, like stepping on a landmine in a mine field. You knew it was a possibility but you still were taken back when it happened. In the resulting explosion he always found himself re-living the day he had held her death body in his arms after Voldemort had killed her.

He had held onto her until she started to grow cold and stiff. He held her until her skin turned a purplish gray color and felt sticky to the touch. And even then he had only let her go because he had heard the bloody Aurors apparating in the front door, finally answering the distress call he had sent hours before. Where were the Aurors then? Where was the Order of the Phoenix while she and her family were being slaughtered? Why had it taken so long for Dumbledore to track her whereabouts? Why wasn't he there to aid her? And then came the question that always pushed him over the edge: Where were you? His head spun wildly, his throat closed and he was no longer able to breathe.

He got up from the bed with a jump and paced the length of the bedroom with his eyes and mouth wide open, gaping at the darkness like a fish out of the water. The memory seized his mind, gripping him firmly like a demon, and then the demon whispered in his ear that he didn't have to go through all of it again. No, he could go to the lab and fix it… It wouldn't take him more than fifteen minutes to brew the _Lethe serum_. He could drink and forget, he'd be a chip from the old block, just like his father, he could seek relief in the bottom of a bottle … Bile rose to his mouth and he swallowed the bitterness back down. He dug his nails in his palms and forced himself to draw air into his lungs in long paused gulps. He kept it up until he brought his heart rate back to normal.

The effort not to lose it was so taxing that his hands were shaking as he grabbed the chair in front of the desk and sat down. Yes, tonight he wasn't going to sleep either. He might as well do something useful with his time. He pulled a drawer open, looking for the parchment where he had taken some notes for his classes and found a Muggle contraption for playing music that Dumbledore had loaned him. The old Headmaster called it a Walkman. He stared at it crossly before taking it out and placing it over the table so he could examine it at his leisure.

Wizards had been dancing to their own tune since time immemorial, even before written records. The first magical painting found in a cave in the dessert was of the legendary Tavi the Weird dancing to a tune created with a spell. The first magical painting included sound, an invisible drum and flute tune could be clearly heard millennia after. Incidentally that is where the phrase dancing to your own drum comes from. It is argued by some scholars that the first spells were in the form of song, sound and magic are waves that affect each other, which is why correct enunciation of spells matters. So music and magic were indissolubly linked and Snape had wondered why Dumbledore would bother having that Muggle toy. He didn't need it to have music while he walked.

The Headmaster had answered that the machine gave him access to a wider musical catalog than the one inside his own head, vast as that was. And that Severus should count himself lucky to receive an item coveted by the discriminating young men in this the year of our lord 1981. Besides, Albus Dumbledore had said: he liked to keep up to speed with the latest technology. _Sic itur ad astra_ that is how one goes to the stars. Snape couldn't figure out if the man was joking or if he was being serious. Blimey! He wasn't even sure Dumbledore could be serious. The man was living proof of the link between genius and insanity. Magic couldn't take you to the stars and if magic couldn't do it: how could Muggles manage? He had blurted out the question and the old Headmaster had said that Muggles had already made it to the moon nine years after Severus was born, which was the most ridiculous thing he had heard in his life. If Muggles indeed claimed they had done it, it was all probably a hoax.

And yet, perhaps the Muggle toy could be of some use to him. He couldn't hope to listen to Muggle radio, even if he had wanted to. Trying to tune it in at Hogwarts was next to impossible, the floating metals, diminutive material components of spells most wizards weren't aware of, created a barrier against electromagnetic waves, a Faraday cage that distorted radio waves carried through electromagnetic means. Students who wanted to listen to their favorite radio soap or Quidditch match could still listen to their programs because those were transmitted as pure sound waves (which are pressure waves) by the WWN. The Wizarding Wireless Network had the word wireless in its name Merlin knows why, as it did not employed electromagnetism like the Muggle radio. Wizarding radio is magically modified to carry sound through the magical medium known as quintessence and thus it can be selectively blocked and selectively received with magic.

Most teachers thought of the blockage of WWN as a blessing. Imagine the noise if every child was allowed to listen to their own radio simultaneously. And in the evenings there was a curfew that applied to all devices. Blocking spells have a radius of action and it was not really possible to spare the faculty's rooms, which were all over the castle. Severus may have tried to override the spell but, understandably, during the recent war most of the teachers in Hogwarts had set up magical devices to detect unexpected spell casting. Some still might have been fine-tuned to detect even the rather harmless spell required for him to listen to the WWN radio at night. Not to mention that the Hogsmead station was probably not working after midnight.

In that the little Muggle toy had an advantage, it allowed to play recorded music and it came with an individual listening device: headphones Dumbledore had called them, they were some sort of Alice band with felt tips for the ears that made him feel utterly ridiculous. But with them Severus didn't need to disturb anyone while listening to music. He had never been too keen on what the WWN had to offer, perhaps the wider Muggle musical selection would be better. Bloody hell, he was at the end of his rope, he was willing to try anything that could help him settle his nerves.

He went back to the bed, laid down and began fiddling with the Muggle toy. When he had loaned him the contraption Dumbledore had penned a guide of how to use it in a sliver of parchment with the sepia ink he favored. It had diagrams, which was droll as the Muggle machine functioned with rather candid pictographs, a right pointing triangle to start playing, two right pointing triangles to fast forward and two left pointing triangles to play backwards, a square for stopping. He could probably have figured it out on his own, but it was nice of the old wizard to make it easy.

The Headmaster had also loaned him several recordings, little plastic boxes called cassettes. He hadn't the faintest clue of what the Muggle music would sound like. He was weary of judging a book by its cover so to speak; but he didn't even have that, for the covers were handwritten. He went through them, reading titles in Dumbledore's neat calligraphy until one caught his eye. It was French, a language he had learned to be able to read the works of the famed alchemists Nicolas and Perenelle Flamel. The piece was by someone called Debussy and the intriguing title read as _Les sons et les parfums_, the sounds and the scents.

The back of the case explained that it was based on the poem _Harmonie du soir,_ Night's Harmony, by Charles Baudelaire. He'd never heard of the chap, probably another Muggle. He took out the cassette from its encasing and put it inside the machine. And then he noticed the inside of the cardboard lining was covered in Dumbledore's writing too. It was also French, presumably the poem. He started the music and read as he heard the recording. First of all, using the word harmony to describe the piece was obviously ironic. It was beautiful, but it was constructed with superimposing dissonances in a way Severus would have never thought possible for making music. It was otherworldly. And by the end of it, as he read the last verse, he was unabashedly crying.

_A tender heart that shrinks away from the vast void gathers up every shred of the luminous past! While the sun drowns in its own congealed blood, in me your memory burns like a monstrance._

His hand went unconsciously to the reliquary pendant hanging from his neck. It was a campy heart shaped metal locket he had found near the river. He had repaired and polished it but he hadn't mustered the nerve of giving it to the person he had wanted to. He had ended up keeping it for himself. What was hidden inside it was one perfect droplet of blood, still liquid and glistening, preserved by magic when he was sixteen. He looked at it through the tears and remembered the day he had gathered it up reverently from the fitted sheet of his foldup bed with a devotee's sense of blissful awe.

The blood was all that he had to remember that day. Well it was all he had outside his head, for each moment was burnt in his brain as if by a branding iron. And yet, if it weren't for the reliquary, he might have thought it had all been a dream. The only thing that dampened the feeling of happiness was that his dream was probably Lily Evans' nightmare. He just couldn't think of her with the last name of that idiot James Potter, he just couldn't. In his mind she would always be Lily Evans, the auburn haired girl he had fallen in love with and loved still, now and forever.

The droplet of blood was a memento of the happiest day of his life, which had started with a funeral. He remember it all, he could conjure up the events and how he felt with the freshness of something that had happened just the day before. On the summer of 1976 Mrs. Evans had lost the battle to the pancreatic cancer she had been fighting for over a year. The people at the Muggle hospital had given up on her one evening and Mr. Evans had decided to take her home with them. She had passed away a few weeks later surrounded by her husband and her daughters. She had been buried in the Cokeworth cemetery the very next day. Her long sickness had given the Evans time to be prepared. The arrangements were pretty much done by the time she had died.

One could say a lot of things about Petunia Evans, not many of them flattering, but she was nothing if not efficient, especially when it came to hosting a social event. It seemed as if one moment they were engaged in preparations and the very next the funeral was over and they were at the wake. It all ran like a clock. Eileen and Severus had been there to help every step of the way.

Tobias Snape was out on a fishing trip. His father was the kind of selfish man who wouldn't change his plans for anyone. In fact he had been angered by his family willingness to help others. He honestly couldn't see why they would serve anyone's needs but his. Neither Severus nor his mum missed the brute. But by the end of a long day of running errands he was falling asleep standing up and his mum had sent him home to get some rest while she stayed serving tea and replenishing trays of food.

He had only just managed to fold out his bed when a sound alerted him that someone was trying to wriggle their way through the backdoor. He had very keen senses of usual, but he had been so tired that he was unaware of anything until the door creaked. That old thing got worse each year, the only reason why they hadn't been robbed was that they were dirt poor and that the door only opened a bit, leaving no room for anyone but a small children to slip in. He was putting on the sheets when he had realized that the creaking sounds weren't coming from the old springs in his bed.

He had grabbed his wand and went out to see who it was. He didn't want to get in trouble for underage use of magic outside of the school. He had already faced a reprimand for one outburst last year. But sometimes trouble comes looking for you. It wouldn't be the first time one of his father's fishing trips turned out to be just a pretext to have a drinking binge and it wouldn't be the first time he returned home unexpectedly, having forgotten what he was doing out there.

The outburst of magic during his fourth year at Hogwarts which had gotten him a reprimand from the Ministry, had also left his old man with a nasty scar on his left cheek. Ministry letter aside, Severus was glad, because Tobias Snape hadn't laid a hand on his mum since that day and because that had been the inspiration to create _Sectum Sempra,_ a curse of his own. But alcohol could make his dad forget even the pain of the five stitches that had taken to patch him up. He might have come back without being blind drunk too, for he raged at his family for "deserting" him, Severus didn't put it past Tobias to harass them for helping the Evans.

He had inhaled exasperated and had gone out, mentally prepared to get his second Ministry letter. He'd risk expulsion to stop his father from making a scene at the neighbors wake. He steeled his resolve and went with his heart beating madly. But he hadn't been prepared to see the person that was trying to squeeze through the backdoor. It was not his father but his redhead neighbor, Lily.

They hadn't really spoken since that day after the DADA exam when the idiot Potter and his cohorts had humiliated him in front of all the school. That day he and Lily had exchanged harsh words and he hadn't found a way to say he was sorry afterwards. They had staid apart all summer and the only words he had spoken to her were his condolences, which he presented rather stiffly in front of his mother and her father. And now there she was, trying to sneak inside his house.

She had never been inside his house. He was thunderstruck, so he was slow to react when she yelled.

"Blimey, Sev! Your backdoor doesn't work!"

She said it as if it were his fault. He put a stiff upper lip: "It hasn't worked for years." As if it weren't supposed to. Then he punctuated: "We use the front door, it works just fine."

"Open the window then, I don't want anyone to see me coming in."

He might have refused, taking the slight offense in her words and using it to raise a wall between them, but he couldn't; not after noticing the redness of her puffy eyes and the way she dragged her feet. He was well acquainted with the tiredness that is only in part of the body and comes mainly from the soul being weighted down.

He had been dragging his feet and slouching like that for a good many years. Only after the grades came in and told everyone the greasy mudblood Slytherin was the only one who had achieved straight Os in his O.W.L.s, eleven of them, even above all Ravenclaws, had he started holding his head high. His grades had always been good but that year they were truly outstanding and that had gotten the attention of Rabastan Lestrange and Barty Crouch Jr. He had his new friends Avery and Mulciber to thank for that introduction. Rabastan was one year older and Barty Jr. two years younger than him but they were the ringleaders of his house. Prompted by them he had begun essaying holding up his head high and straightening his back.

Rabastan had said that the only way people respect you is if you scare them into it. Respect is equal to fear and anyone who said the contrary was a ninny. And he was Head Boy and one of the most feared Hogwarts had known, so he knew what he was talking about. Still, Severus knew how Lily was feeling, and he cared about her so he was already lifting the double hung window in their kitchen to let her sneak in when she protested.

"Come along, Sev, it is cold out here."

It was, in the summer the rain could make the temperature drop fast, particularly on the row of houses that were under the shadow of the colliery's chimney. The murky river behind them added damp making Spinner's End prime real estate in the township of Cokeworth, as Tobias Snape liked to say in the odd sober moments in which he favored a certain brand of dark humor that he called irony.

The night's air smelled of ozone from distant thunder, a storm was coming, and she was only wearing a light sleeveless black dress that flapped around her in the draft. He closed the window with a snap and looked at her from the corner of his eye as he fought to light up the old stove with some matches. She entered the parlor rubbing her arms to try to heat them and passing a hand over her hair to coerce flyaway strands back in the high bun that her sister must have insisted she wore. Petunia was madly jealous of Lily's good looks, particularly her red mane. Severus wasn't surprised that the scrawny mousy girl wouldn't let that go, not even for their mother's funeral.

She looked at the half made bed: "Is this where you sleep? Your house is so small."

Having her in his home made him feel awkward. He sounded snappier than he meant when he replied: "I'm sorry I cannot offer you the hospitality you are used to, Miss Evans. I wasn't expecting company. Least of all yours, we haven't been on friendly terms lately."

She brushed aside the false formality with a shrug and looked at him cocking an eyebrow: "And whose fault is that, Sev?"

No one called him that, no one but her. He frowned: "Potter's and his goons for starters."

She frowned too, she was a smart girl and didn't miss on the subtle reproach. She scowled at him as the sky darkened around them: "I was only trying to defend you."

He took a backwards step, illuminated by lighting that made the small house's windows tremble: "I didn't ask you to. It made things worse!" He finished shouting to make himself heard over the thunder. So much for wanting to apologize.

She crossed her arms over her chest and shouted over the thunders too: "What was I supposed to do, stand aside? Is not like your gloomy new friends were doing anything. And the way these guys treat you is disgusting. I can't imagine why you put up with it!"

He hadn't had a choice. That was how things were at school, at least for people like him. Everyone but oblivious Muggleborn rising stars like Lily understood the strict pecking order. Her good grades and good looks attracted the good will of the teachers and the other students that didn't mind her heritage, something which protected her within the narrow confines of her house. But things were different for him. Though that was going to change. He had been invited to the Lestrange household twice this summer, he had met Rabastan's older brother Rodolphus, his lovely wife Bellatrix and his friends the newlywed Malfoys. It was hard to believe that girls like Bella and Narcissa were related to that hairy idiot Sirius. They couldn't be more different, so well-bred, and they had graciously let him call them by their given names, even though they were several years his seniors.

His new friends were really important people, not braggarts playing inside the baby playpen fence of Hogwarts. He was mingling socially with the heirs of the sacred twenty eight. Her mum had sold her very last Goblin jewelry to buy him clothes that were appropriate for the couple of summer soirees he had attended. She shouldn't have worried, these people knew what really matters in life: power. They were impressed not by his grades, but with his real knowledge of obscure Alchemy. They were impressed enough that Lucius Malfoy had pulled strings and, for the first time in all his years in Hogwarts, he was getting new books, a couple of uniforms and supplies through a grant given by the Malfoy family.

He was moving upwards in life and things were going to be different come next school term. He had one school year to make Potter twist. His friends said that in all likelihood Potter was going to be made Head Boy on the seventh year. The masses loved to elevate stupid Quidditch players to positions they felt were key. In reality the position was worthless if you didn't have other holds on power too. And up to a point the people who were really in control had to let the mass keep their illusions. Cordelia Rosier was going to be Head Girl come next year and she was going to be the one who really ran the show. It was all a game of chess and most people weren't aware of it.

Yes, the next school term wasn't going to be easy for Potter and his friends. Especially for the pale lanky one, Lupin. He was obviously hiding something bad. Severus had his suspicions of what his secret was, but so far he hadn't been able to prove it. Barty was already on the track and his dad was a high ranking officer in the Ministry, if Severus' suspicions were right the scandal was going to bring down Potter and his friends and perhaps even Dumbledore for allowing a bloody werewolf to study alongside innocent students. The chain breaks in the weakest link Barty had said, and, of course, he was right. That chain was going to break, not only to benefit Severus Snape but because weakening Dumbledore was beneficial for his new friends' grand scheme in the long run.

He was now part of a grand scheme. He had to rein in his enthusiasm. For one must not sell the bear's pelt before having killed the furry brute. He had to bite down a derisive laugh at the thought of the word furry. He had to bid his time. He crossed his hands behind his back and said: "The way I'm treated by those idiots is not something I like to dwell in and I'm sure it is not why you are here..."

He stopped cold, instantly losing his bravado. He couldn't think of one single reason why she'd be in his house. He asked with genuine bewilderment: "What exactly are you doing here, shouldn't you be home at a time like this, Lily?"

She sighed and signaled in the direction of her home with a bob of her head: "I needed to get out of there. I was suffocating. My dad is just going through the motions like an Inferi. He keeps muttering everything is going to be alright, but I don't think he really believes it. He is broken, Sev... And I don't know how to put him back… Mum would have, but mum is…" She sniffled and swiftly wiped her tears away: "And Petunia… Merlin, Petunia is even worse. Is as if nothing had happened! She is so chirpy, acting like the perfect hostess. Bossing us around with that snide horse smile of hers: Do this my dear and do that my dear… Bloody hell! She insisted on buying flowery curtains to make the house homelier for the wake. She made devil eggs and pigs in blankets as if we were having a bloody party. And she knows mum hated them, she thought flowery prints were cheap and that _hor d'oeuvres_ were campy. Petunia couldn't even wait for her to be underground to take over the house… It just makes me want to snap her neck… I won't even have to use my wand, I'll gladly do it with my bare hands." Her voice trembled: "And mum, mum is gone. I… she wasn't really there these past few weeks… but now she is really gone… gone forever, Sev." She sobbed and big drops started falling down her cheeks in synchrony with the raindrops crashing on the windowpane, big and loud like stones.

She stood there, trembling and crying, rocking back and forth on the ball of her feet, holding herself until he couldn't stand it anymore and hugged her. He was going to let her go as soon as he felt her stiffening against his embrace, but then she had relaxed and passed her arms around his waist, leaning against his shoulder. He held her tight, supporting her weight and his with a lump in his throat. He held her warm lit body until she stopped crying.

When she stopped, he let her go gently and said in a soft voice: "I'll make some tea..."

She hadn't let him go. She held onto him, grabbed the back of his head and made him lean towards her. She leaned her head slightly back and kissed him.

He was petrified.

She looked at him through narrowed eyes: "I know you like me, Sev. I've known for years. You are always following me around with puppy eyes."

He pulled away: "I like being with you. I thought we were friends. You don't need to add another admirer to the list. I think you have enough of those, Lily Evans."

Her eyes welled up again: "I've never needed a friend more than I need one now, Sev. I really do. I feel so cold inside, like I've been kissed by a Dementor and all the warmth has been sucked out of me. I feel like I'm never going to be able to feel anything good again. All I can manage to feel is pain." She showed him her palm, there was a scar running from her thumb to her wrist. It was angry and red, with all the signs of a magical scar, like the one in his father's cheek.

He gasped: "Did you do this to yourself?"

She looked at him wide-eyed: "I just did it to feel something other than anger." She gritted her teeth: "I was going barmy. I feel so bloody angry. Angry that I know how to turn a tea cup into a mouse to get a perfect score in my Transmutation exam, but I couldn't help her! What the fuck is magic good for if it cannot stop those you love from dying?" She closed her eyes, her face contracting in a mean scowl as she breathed raggedly: "I couldn't even help her with the pain, Sev! And I tried, I really did! In the end nothing they gave her helped. Not the fucking morphine, not any spell I could find. And she fought so hard to pretend she was OK, so we wouldn't worry. But before we put her inside the casket I saw the bed sores, they were bone deep, bone deep. 'Cause in the end even moving a little bit made her flinch, so she stayed there, crucified in the same position until she dropped dead. It must have hurt like hell! And they wouldn't receive her in St. Mungo, even though they were willing to receive the Abbot's pet crup when it broke one of its tails! But my mum didn't deserve the compassion they gave to a dog because she was a Muggle. They might have been able to help her, at least with the pain. And when I think about it all I can feel is anger." She hissed: "Anger filling me, inside out, oozing out of every pore." She stood trembling with her mouth twisted, her hands in fists: "Until I drown."

He could think of at least three potions that might have helped Mrs. Evans, but he kept quiet. He wasn't sure if they would actually work on a Muggle and he would never have thought of offering. The Magic world and the Muggle world were not supposed to be mixed or there would be consequences, terrible consequences. He lived with them.

American wizards had ben right not allowing mixing with Muggles. The Rappaport laws had protected them until 1965, when the muggle lovers had managed to ban it. Under the Rappaport laws befriending or marrying Muggles was prohibited by law and the few squibs or muggleborns that couldn't be effectively schooled were obliviated and syphoned of what little magic they had thanks to the studies on Obscurials product of the last SoS breach in1929. You just had to look at the numbers to clearly see the advantages. They had reduced the Muggleborns to less than 0.05 percent of their population, Ilvermorny could boast of a near perfect record in regards to no hazing of half-blood or muggleborn students because they had virtually none. A homogenous student body guaranteed a well-run school. The Americans had managed to maintain fifty years of no breaches of the Statute of Secrecy. And it didn't take a genius to figure out why. It was so obvious! Why with the greater life span, the resistance to sickness and injury wizards and witches had, mixing with Muggles was a ticking bomb of resentment ready to explode at the first chance. His father couldn't stand to look at his mum who, homely as she was, looked twenty years younger than him. Not to mention the stupid Muggle expectation that magic was supposed to sort out every problem was another source of trouble.

The idiots didn't have a clue. Half the bitterness his father felt came from what little profit he had derived from having a witch wife. In the beginning he had thought he had struck gold, and when he found out it was leprechaun gold that he couldn't use outside fairyland, he had gone berserk. Once he had stolen two galleons from his mum and tried to pay his drinks with them and the coins had disappeared and went back to their owner as they were meant to do. It was the simplest spell, one only a wizard thief could undo. The shopkeeper had beaten the crap out of Tobias and in retaliation he had done the same with his wife. And that is the story of how little Severus Snape had been born one month earlier than expected, a little runt literally beaten out of his mother's womb. He knew anger was no use, he let it sweep pass him. His father would have his day of reckoning soon enough.

His mum had offered to exchange her galleons for Muggle currency but at the rate the Goblins would give her, she could only do it at a loss. Trying to arbitrage would only make the money disappear, even from digital records, everyone knew that, except stupid Tobias Snape. That was by design, because the Ministry had no interest in seeing gold and silver inundate the Muggle world or the other way around. The Statute of Secrecy reigned supreme. So once Tobias had been explained he was going to lose in the bargain, he had preferred to keep that in reserve. However he had agreed to dilapidate his wife's money whenever they had fallen behind on the mortgage and that had nearly depleted what little mum had in her Gringotts vault. Of course he wouldn't recognize the house was really mum's and he didn't give a damn that Severus barely had enough to buy school supplies afterwards.

Merlin be blessed that the Pureblood's notions that mixing bloodlines weakened the blood were lies, he and Lily were living proof that magical blood was stronger by far. Still, the only real chance at happiness they both had was cutting ties with their Muggle family as soon as they could. He was only waiting to be able to secure employment to leave Tobias Snape behind. His mother's illusions in regards to her Muggle husband were long gone, so he was only going to lose half his family, the half he cared less about. He knew it would be harder for his friend. But it was for the better. Even Petunia would be happier once she had forgotten the sister she envied. Of course Lily Evans was not yet in a place where she could listen to those reasonable arguments. She needed to blow off steam, so Severus let her rage like the storm outside while nodding encouragingly.

The anger bubble swelled up until it burst in a rush of hurt. She sobbed: "That is all I can see when I close my eyes and think of my mum now, the bed sores. I don't remember her smile, her voice, the way it felt when she held me, nothing. All I remember are the bloody bed sores... that and the awful smell. Sweet Merlin, the smell! Petunia threw away the linen, she said we had to throw away the whole mattress because the smell is never going to come off. And dad…" She choked on her own tears: "Last night I caught him rolled up in a ball behind the bins holding onto her bed sheets and crying. These images keep going inside my head in an endless reel and I can't make them stop… I just can't…I need to feel something or I'll break just like dad broke or stop caring like Petunia did! I need to feel something other than anger or I'll go insane, Sev. Honestly I feel like I'm already halfway there..."

She laughed and what came out of her mouth was such a horribly crazed cackle that he could do nothing but hold her tight. When she finally grew quiet he took her hand and kissed her palm, tracing the scar. She cupped his cheek with her hand and made him lean towards her. They kissed and this time he didn't pull away, he let her do.

She was the one who let go. He leaned in longingly and she put her hand wide open over his chest. She stepped back and without taking her eyes off him she slowly pulled the skirt of the black dress up her legs, past her waist and when she reached her midriff she passed it over her head and threw it on the floor. She was only wearing a frilly slip.

He stared at her from head to toe and back up. When he reached her eyes again they looked at each other until he felt compelled to say something. She put two fingers over his lips and shushed softly. He went silent, afraid even to breathe too loud and break the spell. She unbuttoned his black shirt, took it off and threw it on the floor too. She snaked her hand down his chest, his belly and reached his belt. She started unbuckling him and he felt an immediate reaction. He took her hand off, picked her up and carried her to his bed. He laid her down and finished undressing under her relentless eyes.

The world went pitch black, the storm was howling outside and the small house was only illuminated by lighting. He saw her only in flashes of red and white as he laid back with her straddling him. He helped support her weight with his hands on her waist or over her round soft breast when she leaned in. He kept his eyes opened until the very last, as if trying to memorize every inch of her, not quite believing she was real. He fixed in his mind the image of Lily, her red mane floating about her like a halo, letting out little moans and gasps, her beautiful mouth a perfect circle while she grabbed at the flat sheet in bunches with her hands. He hold onto the image until he could no longer hold onto the world, he toppled over the edge with his own soft moans, closing his eyes shut.

He didn't quite remember falling sleep, when he woke up she was no longer there and the only proof he had that what had happened was not a dream was a small spot of bright red blood on his white fitted sheet. He was about to touch it when he was seized by an idea. He got up, looked around and carefully lifted a plank of the hardwood floor and took out a tin box. He kept his few savings and some important things there, it wasn't much, so he had found the heart locket right away. Finding the spell in his grandpa's library took more time, but he did. He put on his sleeping gown, which he insisted on using inside the house to his father's chagrin who said wizarding clothes were for pansies. He tidied up the Muggle clothes, which he in turn despised, setting them over a chair and waited for his mother to come laying under the covers, breathing rhythmically to feign sleep.

It took a while before his mother came home. She entered careful not to disturb him and went to her room. It seemed his dad wasn't going to come home but he could hear her move around the house, hesitant, before finally going to sleep. His mum could act fidgety as a hunted beast. Severus knew he could get away with casting some spells if she was home, for the Ministry trace couldn't really distinguish if an adult or a minor had cast the spell. Spells cannot create intelligence. There were wizards and witches monitoring the alerts and if the spell was of a level sufficiently higher than what could be expected from the children nearby, they just assumed it couldn't have possibly been a child who had cast it. The fools. If he hadn't let his temper get the best of him, he wouldn't have gotten the reprimand. What is done is done. This time around he didn't want to risk losing his prize to rashness.

Blood is one of the most especial magical components, it creates a bond between the caster and the donor, whether willingly or involuntarily. That book in his grandfather's library was an old book, old enough to be from before the time magic started to be deemed as light or dark, but currently it would definitely be labeled as Dark Arts. It included a cloaking spell to make it harder to trace, he might have even been able to cast it while his mum was out, but better safe than sorry. Blood magic is often regarded as some of the darkest and only magic that affects the soul is thought of as darker than magic that affects the blood. Of course blood you could see and souls you couldn't.

Severus only knew of two instances of casting magic purposefully to affect souls. Basically because no one had an actual working definition of what a soul is and you have to have some notions about a phenomenon to create spells and charms which affect such phenomenon, even if afterwards about any moron can use them without understanding what they truly entail. Creating original magic requires actual knowledge of how things work. And knowledge on souls is sketchy at best, it took someone very brave, stupid or desperate to cast soul magic, more likely a combination of all three. Dabbling with soul magic had been Voldemort's undoing. If he hadn't been so fearful of death, he would have ruled for years over the world. He had tried to cut corners and failed miserably, for the only real way to conquer death is, quite simply: living; as any organism, from bacteria to each and every human being knows in the most basic instinctual level. And life is bounded by death at both ends.

For someone who, like Severus Snape, wasn't really sure that anything like a soul exists, for ghost are resonances, little more than memories, blood magic was some of the most powerful he could ever hope to cast. And he didn't take the matter lightly, not even when he was sixteen. Lily Evans was his friend, he should have washed the sheets and forgotten all about it. He should have, but he couldn't. By the light of an August moon he cast the spell to preserve her blood and created a bond that would carry even beyond her grave.

After the stroll down the paths of his memory he finally felt sleepy. He was half asleep with the ridiculous Muggle contraption still on his ears, when a thought seeped slowly in his consciousness: He had poured his will and his hopes in that spell and had the locket on him since the day he had cast it, so it may even be the case that the spell was powerful enough to survive, at least for a while, even after his own demise.

_AN: Recent developments in another site have led me to believe I don't longer know what may offend people. In an effort to curve that, allow me a small disclaimer. First, let me state my biases: In regards to civil rights I lean towards liberal, culturally I lean towards conservative in that I'm all in for preserving expressions of our past and heritage, within a framework of mutual respect; while in politics I'm center with a slight tendency towards the left. __S__o there: In that light, the views that Severus has on Muggles, especially those that I'm implying led him to become a Death Eater, are not mine. I like making up characters that are outside my comfort zone, for me it is part of the fun._


	2. Chapter 2

Visitation

"_The summer had inhaled and held its breath too longThe winter looked the same as if it never had goneAnd through an open window, where no curtain hungI saw you, I saw you, comin' back to me."__Marty Balin ('Comin' Back to Me, song by Jefferson Airplane in the album Surrealistic Pillow 1967.)_

_AN: The weregild or price of the blood was the money paid for taking a person's life. It was an improvement over the Lex Talionis (a life for a life) that could end up in a feud with revenge crossing generations. The Gorgons were three sisters who were punished by turning them into monsters because one of them got raped inside Athena's temple, by the by, the rapist (Athena's uncle Poseidon) was not found at fault (yikes). Amulets with the likeness of all three sisters are thought to exist, but I'm using the best known, Medusa, as a stand in for all three. Anemotis is an epithet for the Greek goddess Athena that means the subduer of the storm and Glaux is Greek for little owl. The goddess of wisdom was usually represented with an owl and that seemed to fit nicely in the HP world. The OC is based on my favorite middle school Maths professor. I'm old enough to have had an actual kaftan wearing flower power girl teaching me Algebra and Trigonometry. I thank her from the bottom of my heart for teaching me to love Maths. That is one of the best gifts anyone has ever given me._

Chapter II: Weregild

Euneirophrenia is the word to describe the state of mental peace one has after having pleasant dreams and it was also the best to describe Severus' disposition that morning. He had slept well for the first time in months. He woke up with light streaming through the window, slightly disoriented, but with a sense of wellbeing that he hadn't felt in years. Perhaps since he had joined the Death Eaters.

He rose from the bed tentatively, waiting for despondency to jump on him like a prowling beast. He tucked the Walkman and the cassettes inside his desk, picked up a clean black gown and a towel from his closet. On the way out the door he remember to summon his bag of toiletries and made his way to the men faculty's bathroom. All the time while he shaved and bathed he kept checking for signs of the blinding darkness that had been his constant companion up until yesterday. But the darkness had declared a truce. He didn't let his guard down, though, Severus Snape was a man of suspicious nature and he viewed any good thing as a mere respite in the torturous road of life.

He was going downstairs to the Great Hall when guilt paralyzed him. How could he? How dare he forget for an instant how he had betrayed the women he loved? He was about to start panicking when he was ran over by Professor Anemotis Glaux, the Arithmancy teacher. The airhead, as he called her inwardly, was in charge of minding the girl's that had stayed behind during winter break. She had been reading from a huge binder. It was usual to see her with her freckled flat nose stuck in a book, not watching where she was going. Even though she was thin as a rail, she was tall and muscular. She had bumped full force right into him, almost sending him flying down the stairs. The woman was oblivious and had only taken her eyes off the pages she was reading when she heard him grunt.

She looked like a crane that had an owl head pasted on. She tilted her round head sideways and blinked with her big gray blue eyes, magnified to even greater proportions, behind her horn-rimmed cat eye glasses. She gazed at him from her height, a good head above him, and said with her thick American accent: "Morning Severus. Like I didn't see you there."

He scoffed: "I surmised as much. Perhaps, if you weren't reading while you walk, Anemotis, you would have noticed I was right in front of you."

She giggled, an incongruous sound given that she had a deep raspy voice. It was discomfiting how such a wispy person could produce such a gravelly sound. She had caught his surprised look the first time they had spoken and had said her mamma had called hers a Loretta Lynn voice, if Loretta had been born in Jersey, which she hadn't as she had been born in Kentucky just like mamma. She had said all that in just one single breath and had left Severus deeply regretting having asked her to pass him the salt. How could he have known the horror that he was going to unleash with what seemed like a perfectly innocent request? And no, to this day he hadn't the faintest clue of who on Merlin's green Earth Loretta Lynn was and, as far as he was concerned, he was not worse off from it.

When she finished giggling she said: "Oh I had looked about just a heartbeat 'fore and there was no one there. Are you sure you were there all along?"

The staircase had started moving. He struggled not to be cast out of it. The woman held him by the elbow and he was able to get a hold of the railing. He answered jerking free from her grasp just in the border of rudeness: "As sure as one can be of anything."

She giggled some more: "Good, you aren't supposed to apparate on the school grounds, you know?" She squinted and noticed he was grabbing at the railing for dear life as he hadn't quite regained his balance when he got free: "Are you alright, Severus?" She said offering him her hand.

She was the person closer to his age in the faculty, being twenty seven. She was a Muggleborn who had studied in Ilvermorny. She had been sorted in House Thunderbird and went around telling it as if people were supposed to know what that meant. She also had a Ph.D. in a Muggle college called Caltech. She was actually very proud of completing the graduate program in Maths in five years straight. Maths being the Muggle version of Arithmancy for what Severus could surmise. And she wore either ghastly orange and white gowns for her Muggle college or red gowns with a clover print and golden trim for Ilvermorny.

Anemotis Glaux, Annie as even her students called her, was an airhead that wore her dirty blonde hair in a messy pony tail and always had enchanted fresh daisies for earrings. Whenever he had crossed her on the hallways she was or mumbling things to herself. She also liked to tell at length to anyone who'd listen that she was a fierce Fitchburg Finches fan. Apparently she had been a Keeper in school. She was also a New Jersey Nets fan, they played a Muggle sport called basketball that the barmy bird had played too. She had tried to explain to him the mechanics of the game over the course of four meals, in spite of the evident lack of enthusiasm he had showed for the subject of sports or, for that matter, to engage in any sort of conversation with her. Somehow everyone had assumed they were going to get along, Merlin knows why, and they had been sat besides each other in the faculty table.

He straightened up without accepting her help and regarded her with a disapproving scowl: "Not quite, Anemotis. I'm not used to starting my day by almost being thrown down a flight of stairs."

She tilted her head the other way and blinked some more: "Was that my doing?" She didn't let him answer: "I'm sorry, Severus. Like I was distracted by the most fascinating paper by Daniel G. Quillen. Brilliant guy, won the Fields medal a couple of years back. He is from Jersey too." She winked at him in a way that was disquieting and then she resumed her rambling: "Dumby lent me some of his works to have something to read over the holidays. Mamma and pops are on a cruise in the Caribbean, they have just retired and mamma finally convinced pops to take their first vacation in like years. They invited me to go, but Mighty Merlin I'm violently allergic to shellfish, turn into a freckle under the sun and mamma always bugs me to shave my legs when we go for a swim, which is like bummer. So I figured I'd cover for Sybill and let her enjoy her vacations. She was so excited about it. She said the Department of Mysteries was covering all her expenses and that her gift was finally gonna pay off… I dunno what gift she was talking about, perhaps she won something in a raffle. What do you think?"

She adjusted her hideous glasses on the bridge of her pudgy nose and blinked perplexed. Severus stifled the need to wrench her neck and remained silent. He had found out it was better not to encourage her. Besides, she didn't need any encouragement to keep yapping.

"Anyways, the paper is fascinating. This guy has the most A-Mazing notions on K-theory and Ring theory, real revolutionary for topology. And the implications for physics… Are like mind blowing!" She all but shoved in his face her thumb and forefinger held closely together and giggled: "I think non-magical theorist are this close to figuring things in field strengths and charges that may help them understand the nature of magic. Everything is leading them to posit the existence of a fifth elemental force. Once they get there then figuring out quintessence is a magical field is pretty derivative." She smiled brightly: "Don't you think that understanding is the best way for all of us to finally learn to live in peace together?"

That was a rhetorical, not to mention stupid, question, so Severus didn't bother answering.

The woman didn't even noticed: "I mean like I haven't been so excited about a paper since I found out about Noether's Theorem and its implications on conservation laws. I honestly couldn't understand Gamp's Law until after I read Emmy Noether. She is the reason why I became a mathematician in the first place. She's A-Mazing. Well, was, 'cause she's dead now… Died at fifty three. So sad, a real shame. Dumby introduced me to her during my exchange here at Hogwarts. I mean to her work… But he met her, like for real back in 1932, right before the Nazis took over, when she was teaching in the University of Gottingen. Apparently an old boyfriend of Dumby was very interested in her work. Dumby says the guy had an uncanny intuition for finding people who were gonna become mayor players and he figured out it was worth checking her out."

Severus rose an eyebrow: "An old boyfriend?"

She frowned: "Oh, aren't we supposed to talk about that? Jeez, there are lots of people that are not supposed to be named and things we are not supposed to mention and I'm always getting them wrong. Wouldn't it be easier for everybody if we just like talked about whatever we want?"

He scoffed: "Only if you are dead set on bringing about the Armageddon."

She shrugged it off in her crane like way: "Pops is always telling me that I should think before I speak. I guess that is what mamma calls being polite…"

"Wise people, your parents."

She giggled: "What I mean is that Dumby has had such an interesting life. Like he knows everyone! Literally everyone! Just last summer he was at Feynman's house in Baja. Like for real I would give a limb to be invited there… Well maybe not a limb, but you know? I've heard the man plays some mean bongos. Can you imagine how groovy it would be to play my ukulele with like the man himself? Did you know Dumby plays the transverse flute? You should hear his arrangement of _Mr. Tambourine Man_. That's another one! He knows Dylan too, so that sure can't hurt." She giggled some more.

No one would have dared suggest Severus Snape was a coward, but at times caution is the better part of valor, he didn't even blink, least he brought upon himself the blight of having the woman bring her horrid Muggle instrument to the Great Hall.

"Anyways, the paper is awesome, real interesting things are about to happen in topology. It is a great time to be alive!" She ended with a bright toothy smile that just rubbed him the wrong way.

He scowled even meaner: "I suppose the war victims will concur with you, those who survived that is."

She looked sad for about two seconds, bowed down, and then bounced right back pushing her cat eye glasses up her nose: "Oh yeah, the war… Such a mess. My older brother was in Vietnam. He was a commercial pilot and they enlisted him to fly a chopper. He barely made it out in one piece. He saw things, man… heavy stuff. That one was a mess too. I dunno why people can't be nice to each other. Good thing what's his name kicked the bucket, don't you think?"

He didn't feel inclined to think about the subject of Voldemort's undoing. He tried to steer the conversation from the course that could sent him spinning right back into darkness. He threw her a bone while the woman paused for breath: "Dumbledore thinks he is still alive."

Her eyes grew even bigger, something that seemed impossible: "Wow! Then he probably is, 'cause Dumby wouldn't say something like that without having good reasons for it. He never jumps to conclusions. I've seen him go as far as demonstrating a theorem… Like twice! I mean when most people won't be bothered… I mean a theorem is like already demonstrated and stuff."

He decided to try scolding her to send her on her way: "Professor Dumbledore is a man of many facets, on that we all agree. I hope you also agree that you shouldn't be calling him Dumby where students can hear you, Professor Glaux."

She tilted her head one way and then the other. Her glasses rode down her insignificant nose as she did and Snape had to cross his hands behind his back to stop himself from fixing them once and for all: "Guess you are probably right, Severus…I mean Professor Snape… Hmm, I wonder..."

"Yes?"

She fixed her glasses on her own and pouted: "I wonder if I should have sausages with my eggs for breakfast. I probably gonna stick to bacon though. I mean, I can't get over what happened to poor Étienne. It was like so AW-ful. I hope he fully recovers over the winter break."

And she went downstairs without looking back. The woman was insane, no doubt.

The students that remained were already sitting in the Great Hall around one of the tables. All houses were mixed together, though they were more than usual because of the war. Some of these children no longer had a family to go back to, they were going to be allowed to stay during the winter break, but during the summer they would have to go with relatives or to orphanages.

Anemotis had beat him to the Great Hall and was already "row calling" in her unusual way, which involved going around the table and greeting each student, asking how they had spent the night, talking about Quidditch teams, the last issue of _The Adventures of Martin Miggs, the Mad Muggle_ or the last chapter of _Swept off Her Broomstick,_ a radio soap that had just resumed transmissions. Somehow the woman who couldn't remember to look where she was going, remembered every child's name and favorite things. And even more surprising, she listened patiently to their inane blabber.

She went around the table, all sunshine and giggles, in her billowy orange gown, like a giant toddler. You'd think that these gloomy students would hate her, but they didn't. For some reason she inspired maternal feelings even on the boys. They had lost everything but still managed to feel protective of the scatter brain. They probably saw her as one of them. Severus had even seen one of the meanest Slytherin girls braiding the airhead's hair so the loose strands wouldn't fall on her soup at lunch time. Even if the girl had nagged at the airhead all the time while she braided the barmy bird's hair, it was a surprisingly kind gesture.

The effect of his presence as he entered the Great Hall was like a draft of cold air. The students all stood up immediately and said: "Good Morning, Professor Snape."

He nodded with the bare minimum courtesy and took a sit; while Anemotis went around the table unfazed. She even hugged one of the smaller boys and, for the look on the face of the girl and the boy sitting on either side of the fortunate one, they would have wanted a hug too. Much as it pained him to admit it, the woman was good at teaching them too. Of course she did it in her own weird way. But she got results. He had benefited from her willingness to tutor students for remedial classes. Two hours baking cookies with the barmy bird and even the worse dumbarse in his Potions third year class was able to handle proportions and fractions.

Watching her interact with the children from the corner of his eye he admitted grudgingly that Albus Dumbledore had been right to choose her to stay behind. These children needed someone as off her trolley as Anemotis, who could remain cheerful after all that had happened. Frankly he didn't feel up to the task of comforting them. His own grief was more than enough to handle. Perhaps even more than he could handle, if he had had to consider the children.

Things had the tendency of falling right into place around the Headmaster in a way that made most people wonder if it could all be due to pure chance. Severus Snape did not wonder, he was sure that underneath that multicolored gown the man was a Machiavellian master mind. Dumbledore was adept at placing the pieces in just the right way so they would topple just like and when he wanted. He had been one of the pieces on the man's board and perhaps he still was.

He was trying to figure out if that was a good or a bad thing when he noticed that Anemotis had sat down and was discussing the day's activities with the children. Did she just say what he thought she had? No, he must have heard wrong. Not even the barmy bird could be so out of it to actually propose that they gamble with the students. But she repeated it between giggles.

He drew breath in: "Is Professor Dumbledore aware that you intend to turn Hogwarts into a casino, Professor Glaux?"

One of the older boys dared roll his eyes at him. It only took a raised eyebrow to have the little fool shrink back in his seat. Barmy bird was undeterred by raised eyebrows.

She tilted her head: "Oh they don't let you count cards in casinos, believe you me. They get like real mad about it if you do. I don't really understand why, but they kinda think it is cheating. The tales I could tell you about it... Long story short, after my cousin Amelia's hen party I'm no longer allowed in any casino in Atlantic City... unless I like use Polyjuice potion or something."

Perhaps some Muggles were not that idiotic, if they were wise enough to ban barmy bird. He had some thoughts on that: "Professor Glaux! You know the use of Polyjuice Potion to associate with Muggles is discouraged unless you have a permit from the Ministry. I'm sure they have some equivalent law in all countries of the civilized Wizarding World."

"I bet they do, governments are like the worst party poopers."

"Professor Glaux!"

"Right." She turned to face the students: "I'm sure the party poo… I mean the governments have the best intentions at heart… Though, mamma always says that the road to hell is paved with good intentions… So there is that." Severus looked at her sternly: "Anyways never, ever use Polyjuice potion without a permit. And Dumby...ledore is unreachable. He went hiking and camping with his… uh… his friend. Anyways, he'd probably think it is just a great way to teach the kids probabilities and stuff. But I ran it by Min… I mean Professor McGonagall and she said that as long as we didn't bet any money it would be OK. To keep things interesting I thought we could use IOUs. Like, I can put two hours tutoring for an entry fee and use cookies and stuff to raise bets, you know?"

"No I wouldn't, I've never played Muggle blackjack before."

Her eyes grew wide: "Oh then you are just gonna love it, Sev… I mean Professor Snape. 'Cause you are gonna play with us, aren't you? Otherwise you'd kind of look like a chicken."

He almost chocked on his tea. Had barmy bird just called him a chicken in front of the students? The students were looking at him with wide-eyed terror. That damned woman! He let out a low growl. And one of the Hufflepuff girls yelped but nevertheless held onto the airhead protectively, as if Severus were going to slap her, for Merlin's sake!

An hour and a half later, as he faced off with barmy bird across the table, he was so close to breaking the promise he'd made to himself in his childhood of never laying a finger on a woman that he almost drew blood from his palms trying to regain control.

"What do you mean you were bluffing? You said there is no bluffing in blackjack!"

"Oh, that is not what I said, Sev… I mean Professor Snape. I said that in casino playing there is no point in trying to bluff your way through blackjack. 'Cause with the dealer having set rules of when to fold it makes no sense, you know? But in the version we are playing, player vs player, where each of us decides when to fold, then it totally makes sense."

He grunted: "That's cheating, Professor Glaux. You misled me on purpose."

"Not at all, I'm sticking to the rules we defined. That is why I insisted on having them in writing and why I said we should all read them carefully. I actually recommended we all read them twice and asked questions, if there was something unclear about them. I also said that this was a game to learn probabilities and logic. Learning to work the rules in your benefit is where the logic part comes in. In the wise words of Kenny Rogers: every hand's a winner and every hand's a loser. And with the lousy hand I was dealt the only chance of winning I had was to bluff like there was no 'morrow." She smiled brightly, fixing her glasses: "And it kinda worked. You folded like a cheap tent."

He grounded his teeth half an inch shorter: "Basically what you are teaching your students is how to lie. That is a lousy lesson and a lousy way to win."

She flickered her toothy grin at him and winked at the students: "A win is a win and sometimes all you can do is take them as they come. Someone always benefits from the small print. Better we teach that lousy lesson to our students playing than they learn it the hard way. Besides, pops says that in life you can count yourself a winner if you break even. So what do you say we make it double or nothing?"

He scoffed and rose to leave: "I rather not. I fear if I stay here any longer, I might start to understand your logic and I don't feel quite prepared for that."

She giggled: "That's the great thing about logic: it is not mine or yours, but the same for all. And no one walks from this table without a prize, take a cookie and grab your prize before you leave."

He sighed, there was no point embroiling in a lengthy discussion with the barmy bird. He picked up a ginger snap from a tray and shoved it in his mouth. Bloody witch! It was a surprisingly good cookie and that somehow made him sourer. He walked out of the Great Hall without picking up the prize and went to his room.

He forgot about it while reading a book by George Starkey published in 1677 twelve years after the man died of the plague with notes by Isaac Newton: _Experiments for the Preparation of the Sophick Mercury; by Luna, and the Antimonial-Stellate- Regulus of Mars, for the Philosopher's Stone._

He kept reading until it was time for lunch. He wasn't really feeling up to it. The sense of wellbeing he had woke up to was slowly fading, not to the point of all-encompassing darkness he had felt when he was hung up to the _Lethe serum,_ but he was definitely not in the mood for company.

"This is what you are getting paid for," he grumbled to his image in the mirror in a tone so like his father's that it made him flinch. As disturbing as it was, it got him moving, he got up and dutifully went to eat with the students he was supposed to be minding.

He went through the meal as well as he could and then he supervised the children during the two hours of study hall that the Board of Governors had made mandatory, probably to justify keeping the school open during the winter break. He felt little enthusiasm about it. He was surprised by the students' commitment to it, though that was probably because of barmy bird's apparent inexhaustible cheerfulness. She went through their assignments with each child and she did it with the same sunshine disposition she had in the morning. He absentmindedly wondered what it would take for the woman to come down from her cloud. By the end of the two hours he felt worn out raw just by watching her.

He was ready to go back to his room and bury himself in another intense reading session or, perhaps, even go to the lab and give Sophick Mercury a try, when Anemotis caught up with him.

"You forgot your prize," She said putting her hand over his shoulder.

He stared meanly at her until she pulled off her hand. He expected her to leave but the woman was not moving. He gave in and asked: "What prize?"

She smiled: "Your prize, from this morning. Yours is the only one left unclaimed. Dumby and Filius, I mean Professor Dumbledore and Professor Flitwick enchanted a box of prizes for the kid's activities during the winter break. They had been working on it for Christmas but, apparently, it still needs some tweaking for it is supposed to give you a fair mix of what you want and what you need. But in some cases that turned to be kind of a curse, so they ended up limiting the wish spell and this is the prototype. Wish spells are like real fascinating examples of hyperbolic equilibrium with no center manifolds, it all hinges on the attraction and repulsion of the stable and unstable manifold, they are structurally stable with small perturbations but with bigger perturbations they easily become chaotic, you know? Need and want, wonder which one of the two is the stable manifold… Cool equations..."

He looked at her with a raised eyebrow.

"Anyways, Dumby wanted us to test it. It is supposed to disappear from the Great Hall once all prizes are reclaimed and don't come back until the next activity and it hasn't… you know? Like disappeared. I've asked everyone else and they all have gotten theirs, so it is a simple process of elimination to find out that you are the one missing your prize."

"I..." He was about to say that he didn't want the prize, but the woman was looking at him expectantly, he sighed: "Fine, where is this magic prize box."

She pointed him towards it and giggled: "It does need so tweaking. Or maybe, it is my wants and needs that need some tweaking. I dunno. Mine was kinda weird, but fun: I got some hyperbolic doilies and some crochet material. You can't really use them as doilies, though, 'cause they won't stay flat. Their inner angles are all like real screwed up. I can't wait for Dumby to come back so we can talk about them. Wonder what yours will be? Give it a try. You don't have to tell me what you got, but I would like to know if it works for you. For Dumby, you know? I mean Dumbledore. I'm helping him keep track of results… For the tweaking and stuff." Once more she left without looking back.

"And stuff," he let out a dry chuckle as he put his hand inside the cardboard box through a hole covered with a black curtain on one of the sides. He pulled out a cassette with a blank J-card. He pinched his aquiline nose between two exasperated fingers and muttered: "What game are you playing, old man?" But of course Dumbledore was not listening, at least Severus didn't think he was. And even if the Headmaster turned out to be that devious, why would he bother answering?

Severus Snape went back to his room and managed to read for a good ten minutes before curiosity got the best of him. He had to listen to the cassette, he just had to. Chiding himself for being so easy to manipulate, he took the Walkman out from the desk and put the cassette in. He pressed the play button tentatively, not knowing what he could expect. He was assaulted by drums, guitars, female and male voices, a Muggle rock band. What in all nine hells?

The band kept singing undeterred, after all it was only a recording. He flickered his wand and cast _Revelio_ on the cassette J-card, in hopes it would tell him something about what he was listening. Dumbledore's neat, leftward slanting spiky calligraphy began appearing on the cardboard. It read: Jefferson Airplane, _Surrealistic Pillow Side A 1. She Has Funny Cars/ 2. Somebody to Love / 3. My Best Friend / 4. Today/ 5. Comin' Back to Me. Side B 1. 3/5 of a Mile in 10 Seconds / 2. D.C.B.A.-25 / 3. How Do You Feel / 4. Embryonic Journey / 5. White Rabbit / 6. Plastic Fantastic Lover. _Which was incredibly unhelpful, by the second song he had guessed they were titles.

The first song's title was odd, the guy was going on about how you only live once and good things can be found in spite of all the sorrow. The choir insisted that everything you need is in your own mind, which had nothing whatsoever to do with funny cars, at least for what little he knew about the Muggle transportation. It may have been a metaphor but of what he could not guess.

The second song had drums and guitars too, but they sounded nothing like the first, they were played in fast beat that, regardless, felt loaded with longing. The singer was the woman with the raspy voice that had sang along in the first song, she was the lead singer here. And he could have guessed the title by the choir. But there were lyrics that rooted him to the spot. _Don't you need somebody to love? _The woman with the raspy voice asked insistently. He held his breath: "What is this?"

He took the J-card out and realized that some lettering had also appeared inside: _Free love can at times feel like too much freedom. Freedom gets lonely really fast._ What was that supposed to mean? For the briefest moment he entertained the thought of asking barmy bird about it. He chuckled. It was preposterous. He was around the part where the woman sang about friends treating you as if you were a guest and a single solitary tear rolled down his cheek. He wiped it up immediately, feeling foolish. He'd never had friends. He doubted anyone does. Once upon a time he entertained the notion but he knew now all he had ever had were accomplices. People were only interested in what they could get out of you.

The third song was a sugar-coated inane love song that made him snort derisively. He pushed the stop button after the first bar and rewind the cassette roughly to where the second song was. He listened to it again, and then he skipped the third song altogether. It took a few trials but he went to the fourth which left him feeling brittle. By the fifth and last song of the A side called _Comin' Back to me_, he was about ready to plunge head first back into darkness.

He looked up towards the window, almost unconsciously. The sun was setting, bleeding reddish rays of light through his window. His rooms were on a third floor, he saw no need for curtains. He fixed his gaze and there was nothing there.

He laughed bitterly: "What were you expecting? The shadow in the mist won't be her. She is not coming back, she is gone."

His voice broke. All the sorrows of the world seemed to drop on his head. He let out a big sigh that resolved into a woeful moan. He took the headphones off brusquely and threw the Muggle contraption against the wall. Except, it didn't hit the stone, it floated midair and was lowered slowly onto the rug at the foot of the bed.

The contours of a shimmering figure were apparent against the carmine sunset rays. He felt his temper raising. It better be an emergency or whatever ghost had dared enter his private quarters was going to exist just long enough to regret it. Ghost are mere resonances of what people once were, voluntary or else, the spell that fixated ghosts was the same in principle as the one used for magical portraits. You can't really harm them, but you can erase them, with the appropriate spells. Of course, what self-respecting wizard would bother? It would be like spitting at the sky, worst case scenario the spit will only fall right back in your face.

He got off bed and snarled: "What do you want?"

The figure became clear and he gasped, grabbing at his wand. This had gone too far. He was going to have a word with the Headmaster, unreachable or not.

A mockery of Lily Evans replied: "I want my due, Severus Snape."

A joke? A joke in the worst possible taste. Damned Dumbledore. This was enough to hand the man his resignation. Then he remembered the wish spell. What barmy bird had said? The wish spell granted you a fair mix of what you wanted and what you needed. That was a curse indeed. She had also said that the spell was unstable under great perturbations. And he had been wallowing in a bucket full of self-pity listening to the stupid Muggle toy. So that thing was nothing but the bloody spell gone terribly wrong.

He hurled the words at the apparition with distilled rage: "_Retexo!_"

The thing chuckled, with the sparkling river laughter she used to have when she was a girl. The charm was strong enough not to be undone by a generalist counterspell.

He ordered himself to toughen up, of course the thing laughed just as he remembered, it was his mind feeding the illusion.

"It is just an illusion," he said sternly, forcing himself to look straight at the thing.

The thing faced him bemused: "Am I now?"

He growled angrily: "_Abrogo!_" That was strong enough to undo all but the most powerful curses.

The silvery figure trembled with laughter and then scowled: "Would you undo me?" Her voice rose up to a clamor: "Was killing me and my family once not enough for you, Severus?"

"I did not..." But he had been telling himself that, over and over, for the past couple of months. He fell to his knees.

The figure approached him and with a harsh hand that felt impossibly real made him look up at her. She leaned towards him, her moonlight hair burning like a crimson oriflamme by the crepuscular sun. She spat each syllable of the word at his upturned face: "Murderer!"

Her icy exhalations stole all color from his already pale face. He wanted to shirk away, but her hand held him firmly in place. Saying he was sorry would have been just empty words. All the words he could have told her about having tried to save them died in his lips before uttering them. She was dead at the hands of Voldemort because of him, the faithful servant that had gone to tell him of the prophecy as soon as he heard it. He might as well have pointed the wand and cast the unforgivable curse himself.

Her eyes were empty. But her dead stare was somehow fixed on him. Like those ancient Greek statues whose pupil-less eyes seem to follow you across the room. Her face was a mask of hatred, a gorgoneion, monstrous Medusa heads that were worn like pendants or carved in doors or shields as amulets against evil. It was easy to see her hair waving in the dying sun rays as a nest of snakes.

Her cold breath bathed him again: "You, my childhood friend, brought death to my door. Where my husband, who you always despised, died defending us! Was it worth it? Where are your thirty pieces of silver, Severus?"

She was oozing anger, like that time. No, not like that time, back then she had been fire and now she was a blizzard, fearsome but ice cold. A non-nonsense part of him asked if he was stupid. Illusion spells feed off the subjects mind. It was so obvious why she would look like a modified version of the single time they had been intimate. Only an idiot would fall for it. He had been so wrapped up in grief that he had screwed the Headmaster's experiment. He needed to pull himself together and end it right away. But that calm and collected voice was drowned by another, louder voice: that of guilt.

"You always acted like you worshiped the soil I walked on, I can only imagine what he offered you to betray me. Won't you show me the price of our blood?"

He whimpered and tried to close his eyes. He wasn't going to be able to think straight if he kept looking at her.

"Oh no, you don't. Look at your handy work! That much you owe me Severus Snape. Look at me! A carcass laying by my boy's cradle. My sweet boy, killed by that monster!" She howled.

Those words untied his tongue: "Your boy is not dead, Lily."

She looked astounded: "What?"

"He lives. He is under Dumbledore's protection. I suspect he is with your sister, but I don't know it for sure. As you might imagine traitors are not readily trusted with sensible information."

"What about Voldemort?"

Her reactions were so genuine that he responded without thinking: "Everyone thinks he is dead."

She scoffed, sharp as ever: "Everyone but you. Why is that?"

"There are signs that point at him being alive, badly hurt, but not yet dead." he rolled his sleeve and showed her the Death Eaters' mark.

She brushed a couple of sinewy frosty fingers pensively over his arm and he should have recoiled but, instead, something within him stirred.

She noticed. She rose a mocking eyebrow: "My word, Severus, would you have me even like this?"

He couldn't answer, he held his breath as she passed her hand purposefully over his chest. She was reaching for his collar to undo it when she took her hand away brusquely.

"What is that you have hanging from your neck? Show me!"

"I don't understand..."

She stepped back: "Show me what is inside the pendant around your neck."

It felt like a nightmare, like one of the many nightmares that had populated his dreams since the day she had died. He obeyed her, undid his collar and showed her the locket, without raising from the floor.

She hissed accusingly: "You stole blood from my cadaver? Have you no shame?"

"I didn't steal it from your dead body." He closed the locket and blushed. He didn't remember ever having blushed before: "You left it behind that time when you… when we..."

"Ah, and what did you expect to gain from it, other than what I had already given you?"

He stood up scoffing: "Lily Evans, what you gave, you also took from me. Let us not pretend that I was anything else but convenient. I'm sure that if I had not been so obliging you would have found someone else. I don't cultivate self-delusion. This was nothing but a token." He pulled the chain, breaking it and tossed the pendant to the floor: "I was fully aware that I should not expect anything else from you." He felt anger replacing a small part of the hurt: "You couldn't wait to go after Potter almost as soon as he was made head boy… so much for the lady's protestations that she'd rather date a squid."

The apparition looked at him intrigued: "Did you sell our lives not driven by greed but by envy then?"

He couldn't admit he had been envious of James Potter, not even to himself. "I asked the Dark Lord to spare you, just you, and knew that he wouldn't as soon as he told me that he would. That is when I went to Dumbledore."

Her voice dripped disdain: "So you offered my child and my husband to your master in exchange for me. And when you realized he was not going to honor the bargain then you turned coats. Well, at least my son was spared thanks to your mercenary loyalties, Snape. You bought enough time for the Order to find and defeat your master."

He scoffed: "On that you are wrong, your friends were not fast enough to rush to your rescue, Evans. Your child was not spared through any action of the Order of the Phoenix, nor any action of mine."

"It is Potter, I died Lily Potter, Snape." He wasn't going to respond to that. The wraith continued: "Then tell me: How was my boy spared?"

"I don't know, no one knows for sure. Dumbledore thinks that your sacrifice saved your boy. Something to do with ancient blood magic. You know Mrs. Potter, for someone who likes to present himself as a white wizard your master sure knows his way around blood magic. I doubt even Voldemort is more knowledgeable of it than he is. Even though blood magic is widely considered a Dark Art."

She pointed at the pendant: "You'd know more about it than I ever could. I don't regret giving up my life to save my boy. My boy who is a Potter too. Is that what makes you hate an innocent baby enough to be able to sacrifice him to your master without a regret? Is that the man you've become?"

He had asked himself those very same questions before. He was not one to visit the sins of the father upon the son, considering who his father had been. That was a kinship he had felt with Tom Riddle. Part of him thought that the reason he had climbed up the ranks of the Death Eaters so fast was not only his magical prowess, but that shared history of having Muggle fathers they both despised. But there was some truth in what the wraith was saying: the fact that the baby was James Potter's son had made things easier when it was determined the boy had to die for Voldemort to live.

"The boy could not be spared, Lily. There was a prophecy telling of Voldemort's downfall and signs that pointed at your boy being the one who had to enact it. There was nothing that Voldemort wouldn't have done to make sure he didn't."

She frowned, her anguish palpable: "But my boy lives and so does Voldemort, according to Dumbledore. So Harry is still in danger and I have no way to keep him safe now."

He was going barmy. He was basically having a conversation with himself through a botched wish spell. He had to put an end to it. But he made the mistake of looking at her. Wraith or not he wanted her, he wanted her as much as he had ever wanted her before.

She looked back at him with narrowed eyes: "I can't do a thing for my boy anymore, but you can." She smiled contemptuous: "Are your loyalties still up for sale, Severus?"

He lifted his wand and muttered: "_Abrogo,_" with so little conviction that he wasn't surprised it didn't worked. He pleaded: "Please, just go away."

"Come on, Sev. We both know I have something you want." She took a step towards him, the tunic enveloping her glowed, becoming thinner than air against the last sun rays.

He stepped back: "Don't call me that."

She kept walking towards him while the clothes she was wearing vanished under the crepuscular light as if they were made out of mist: "I thought you liked it when I called you that."

He kept walking away from her, like a scared little boy: "Only she called me that and she is dead. You are not real, you are just a stupid wish spell gone awry. The spell got it wrong, this is not what I want and certainly it is not what I need."

By the time they had reached the wall, the wraith appeared to be naked. She leaned towards him and she could smell her hair. She had used a lily of the valley air freshener mist as perfume when she was little, mistaking it for the real thing. Petunia had laughed at her, but Lily had twisted it around and had made the air freshener her perfume. Severus remembered how her friends at Hogwarts asked her about it and how she had kept it secret saying it was an old family recipe. Now she smelled the same way she had when she lived, with only the barest whiff of decay underlying it to make it all terrifyingly real. He wouldn't even have been able to smell death on her if it weren't for his Alchemist nose, trained to detect the faintest odor in the lab.

"Don't I look real?" She took his hands and put them over her shoulders: "Don't I feel real to you, Severus?"

She felt real, colder than a corpse but very real. Her cold breath was chilling the air around them and making his own breath rise in wisps of hot vapor, coming out of his mouth irregularly to the beat of his racing heart. Insane as it all was he couldn't help reacting to her.

He tried to look away: "It can't be… It just cannot be!"

"How can you be sure? There is little known about blood magic, let alone about it being used along with wish spells. Merlin knows what are the limits, you enchanted my blood, called me forth in your mind and then set in motion a spell that draws from your want and your needs. Is it really impossible that it is me here, called from my early grave, willing to strike a bargain with you for my son's life? Are you really going to pass on it, if there is even the barest possibility that I am the woman you love?"

His eyes grew wide. And then she kissed him and he was unable to fight her anymore. He kissed her back, throwing the last shreds of caution to the wind. Letting her lead him to the bed as she had done once when they were younger. He knew there were going to be consequences to pay, there always are. But he was already living in hell, so he doubted he would be worse off for allowing himself to have a little taste of heaven, even if it all came from a dark place inside his head.

Ever since he was a child Severus Snape had often been accused of lacking both imagination and a sense of humor. Well, he was proving his accusers wrong. He couldn't help mentally laughing for falling for this crude mind trap. And he sure had more than a little imagination or he wouldn't have been able to conjure up a succubus that looked just like the love of his life down to the freckles on her back. Her skin, her hair, all of her was perfectly rendered. As he caressed her, ever more frantically as they went on, the silvery ghost like color was replaced by the creamy pinkness and fiery red he remembered from the single time they had been together. Even the salt of her sweat tasted right after a while. It was, indeed, an uncanny resemblance; down to how she bit her lips to stifle little moans and rolled her eyes when he touched a particularly sensitive spot. He didn't know if he remembered what she liked or that was just his own ego catering to him.

There was room to doubt the exact extent to which the wish spell was drawing from his mind, because Lily Evans, if the being in his bed was her, had apparently learned a thing or two during her married life that she hadn't known way back when. Things he wouldn't have thought of or experienced the few times he'd been with women afterwards. Things that made it really hard to keep things going for long, even though he'd never been more into the moment with any real person than he was with this illusion. A very realistic illusion, mind you, for he was still hard inside her after he reached release and he managed to keep it while she worked on achieving hers.

As soon as the wraith had regained composure she got off the bed, clothing appeared around her just as promptly as it had disappeared earlier.

She looked at him and pointed towards the pendant lying on the rug: "Pick it up, Severus."

He didn't feel like getting up, in fact he was feeling sleepy for a change. But he obeyed, wrapping the sheets around his waist in an impulse of modesty he couldn't very well explain.

Her skin began to turn silver again, her hair shone like moon rays in the darkness: "By the blood that you enchanted and the price that I've just paid, I bind you to look after my son, Severus Snape, even if it means giving up your life."

He sported a currish grin, the contempt mainly directed at himself: "You don't have to try to bind me with a spell Lily. Ghosts cannot cast spells. And whatever you may want of me, you just have to ask. I've never been able to deny you."

But the spirit, if spirit it had been, was already gone, leaving him clutching the sheets and the locket. He stood there for a couple of minutes, waiting for despondency to set back in, but he didn't feel darkness claiming him. The hurt was there but what once had been a roar, was reduced to the level of a murmur.

He felt oddly peaceful and had the suspicion he would be able to catch sleep by the tail if he went right back to bed. He picked up the Walkman and placed it along with the locket inside his desk. And then he laid down, without bothering to get dressed. He slept all the way through morning a rare occurrence even under the best of circumstances.

The next day he woke up with a certainty that allowed him to get out of bed with willingness. Oddly enough because what he should have felt was doubt, doubt that the whole experience had been real. He didn't know and he didn't care if it had been a true visitation by a vengeful wraith or a botched spell that had drawn from his wounded mind, or –worse- a manipulation by the Machiavellian Headmaster who had rescued him from his plunge into madness. He wasn't looking the gift horse in the mouth; whatever the case may be, Severus Snape had found a reason to live and he was going to hold onto it come hell or high water; right until the moment he could join Lily Evans behind the veil.


	3. Chapter 3

Visitation

"_Every time we touch, hey I don't knowJust tell me where to begin,'cause I never ever felt so much__No I can't recall any love at allBaby this blows 'em all awayIt's got what it takes,So tell me why can't this be love?" Van Halen ('Why Can't This Be Love?' song in the album 5150 1986.)_

_AN: I've been accused of using obscure terminology by my lovely niece, so dear reader: in order __to spare her and you several trips to your encyclopedia of choice, I'll define a few terms: The Gordian knot was a physical puzzle, one no one could untie until Alexander the Great sort it out by cutting it with a sword. A tesseract is a generalization of a three-dimensional cube into four dimensions; the fourth dimension is a really powerful concept formalized by Riemann and Hinton in the second half of the 19th century that allows modern physics and mathematics to exist as we know them. I have the awful vice of creating adjectives from given names. M.C. Escher is one of my favorite artists, who specialized in optical illusions and engraved these nightmarish architectures of stairs that lead back to the point of departure and doors that open into the abyss. The word Escheresque, used to describe Dumbledore's mind in the fic, comes from him. Putative, the title of this chapter, comes from the Latin putatus, considered or believed to be. It is an adjective, so it should be accompanied by a noun. When you start a phrase saying something is widely believed to be true… isn't it often the case that you don't share in that belief? In regards to what is widely believed about Severus, without being necessarily true, I'll let you pick the best noun. There are plenty to choose from._

Chapter III: Putative

It was the black one with the white mittens, Mr. Paws, who first noticed the man in the black hoody sitting on a bench in front of the corner store in Wisteria Walk. Hood was hiding behind a newspaper while nursing a Styrofoam cup of tea. The early hour, coupled with the man's all black attire, the fact that the beverage laid untouched on the flimsy white laminate table and that he was constantly looking over the newspaper would have been enough to arouse the half kneazel's suspicion. But what really tickled its whiskers was the ghost standing beside Hood.

The wraith, unseen to non-magical beings, made no effort to hide that it was watching the children coming and going down the street on their way to the park. The thing jolted and grabbed the man's shoulder as soon as Scar and Fat Butt walked by. Hood had taken a quick look over the newspaper, nodded and growled something between teeth to the ghost, whose eyes had hungrily followed Scar and Fat Butt as they made their way to the jungle gym.

Alarms went off inside Mr. Paws' head. Arabella had been adamant to impress on the clowder that they should be especially mindful of the comings and goings of Scar. So Mr. Paws jumped from his observation post besides the window flower box, which was empty save for a bunch of all but dead hydrangeas and went to tell the clowder's human mum what he had seen.

Of course that ruffian Mr. Tibbles, the tabby, had wanted to steal the black's thunder and ran to the kitchen to tell Arabella. The white, Snowy, and the calico, Tufty, were lounging by the fireplace and wouldn't be bothered, the females liked to take their lead from the clowder's cat mother; which had been a fancy show cat. They acted all prissy and posed. Even though everyone knew they were terrible gossips and loved the ruckus.

Stupid Mr. Tibbles, Mr. Paws was able to outrun the tabby and be the one to tell Arabella, but they had lost enough time so that when they came back to the window, Hood had already stood up. He was edging his way towards the park, making it look as if he were warming up for a run. Clever bastard. If it hadn't been for the wraith floating besides him, Mr. Paws may not have been believed. The world is an unfair place, but sometimes justice prevails and Mr. Paws got a fat oily sardine for his troubles.

Arabella looked out through the tiniest crack in her cheap nylon chiffon curtains at the young man ostentatiously doing calisthenics on the sidewalk. Hood, as Mr. Paws had called him, was dressed in a black tracker suit and sneakers. Black from head to toe, with a hood and long sleeves, the only thing visible of him were a pair of pale hands, a long hooked nose and raven black bangs. His hands were so pale that at first she had thought the man was wearing gloves, but upon a second inspection she realized he wasn't. The lad had pale spindly hands that twitched like a spider attached to his sleeves, the whiteness was only broken by the greenish blue markings of the veins beneath. It was summer but the morning was windy and the skater boys always used hoodies, sunshine or rain. So even though she suspected he was older than the youths usually loitering around the neighborhood in skateboards, he didn't look out of place. And yet, for some reason he was out of place. Even the sport clothes looked off on the young man. Something was not right. A cold chill ran down Arabella's spine.

She might be a squib, but she knew magic when she saw it. In fact, she had enough magic of her own to be able to see things. There was a faint silver shimmer by Hood that told Arabella there was indeed a ghost out there. There had never been a ghost on her street before and to her knowledge no one had died violently of recent. Least of all a wizard or witch. Something like that wouldn't have escaped her clowder's vigilance. Squibs were not as dumb as wizards thought, at least Arabella wasn't, so she quickly realized the implications of the ghost not belonging to the street. Merciful Merlin! She'd heard of it, and she had thought rumors about ghosts that were not linked to a place but that, through some vicious spell, haunted a person were just that, rumors.

Live long enough and you get to see everything. Arabella was the only daughter of a timid witch heir to a tired bloodline who could barely lift a wand and who had married a good Muggle who was an Anglican Pastor; and yet she only prayed when the going got really rough. She clasped her thumb, index and middle finger to a point, with the other two fingers tucked in her palm and touched the point to her forehead, over her diaphragm, on her left shoulder and then on the right one, reciting the Trinitarian formula in her mind. That was a dangerous wizard, if he walked with the dead. What a way to start her morning! With a bloody necromancer, dressed in Muggle clothes going after the boy. If she were to believe Mr. Paws, which she did because it was the most trustworthy half-kneazel of the clowder. She didn't like what was going on out there one bit. She needed to contact Dumbledore ASAP.

She looked sternly at Mr. Tibbles, she wasn't happy with the tabby's sneakiness, but at times it could be useful: "Follow those people out there, be careful not to be noticed, especially not by the ghost. And don't let the boy get out of your sight, unless the man in the hood does something. If that happens, come right back here to report. If I'm not in the house send Tufty to find me."

The calico was crafty, it could find a needle in a haystack blindfolded and with two paws tied together.

Mr. Tibbles' whiskers trembled as if to ask the woman to clarify what she meant by something.

Arabella scoffed impatiently: "You know what I mean. Anything the Muggles are not supposed to see. Now go! You've made us lose too much time already!"

With a little indignant huff and a dismissive swing of its tail, the tabby left through the cat door. The rest of the clowder, having lost all interest in what was going on outside, returned to their posts and carried on with their morning routine.

Arabella wished she could do the same. The Floo Network was not connecting. She'd already sent an owl to Hogwarts, but it was summer and the man wasn't going to be there. He must have left a forwarding spell, but who knew when her letter would be delivered? This seemed urgent enough to need immediate reporting. She sighed, she was going to have to go to Mr. Davies'. Another sigh escaped her lips. The old wizard lived twelve blocks away and was a bit senile, but he still fancied himself a heartthrob. Arabella sincerely doubted the mean old man had ever been one. And she could bet her life savings that the man was going to misinterpret the reason for her visit.

In one last desperate attempt to avoid having to deal with the aged Casanova, Arabella tried to connect through her own Floo once more and all she got was a greenish gook that stuck to her chimney. She knew the shabby youngster that had connected it hadn't done a good job. Of course they had sent the newbie and a lazy one at that. That is the usual treatment squibs get from wizards, even those who still haven't learned to charm their pimples. The little fool reeked of badly crafted bubotuber potion… Most wizards think squibs are fair game for pranks and defrauding. If she sent an owl to the company she was only going to be ignored, it would take a trip to London and a shouting match to get it sorted out. It was too much to bear without even having had her Earl Grey.

Cursing the Floo Network's technician and the bleeding necromancer, she shoved her keys inside her purse and grabbed a plum colored umbrella from the stand by the door. Mr. Davies was senile, but he could be very enthusiastic when pursuing his pastimes. The last time she'd had to borrow his Floo the man had grabbed at her bum and wouldn't let go, before she'd had time to explain what she was doing in his house. It was a good idea to arm herself with something to keep him at bay just in case.

Even though the sky was a perfect shade of rosy blue, she also tied a flower print scarf over her hair rollers and put on a light sweater before going out. She didn't have time to comb her hair or change out of her moo-moo house dress. She also didn't want to risk being seen by Hood, so she had to walk in the opposite direction of the park and take a detour, adding three whole blocks to her route.

She wished a gruesome death upon all conman and all bloody necromancers in the world. And she also wished a fierce rash somewhere really uncomfortable on old pervert neighbors. Arabella carried on mumbling curses and walking at a brisk pace towards a working Floo Network station that she could use to do the job the greatest wizard of the world had entrusted her to do.

* * *

Dressed in Muggle sport clothes Severus Snape felt utterly ridiculous, but Lily Evans Potter, as the entity that haunted him insisted on being called, had a good point to make in regards to it helping him blend in the neighborhood.

Her exact words had been: "What do you think will happen when people see a man skulking about the kiddies' park? Unless you have an invisibility cloak, any other spell is just a strong suggestion to turn a blind eye. Small children are hard to fool by illusion spells, because the distinction between what is real and what is not is still not fixed in their minds. I read a lot on child's development when I was expecting Harry. You are more likely to be noticed by them. Kids are not believed when they blabber about fairies and ghosts, but in this day and age, when a bunch of them start talking about the scary man in the black gown spying on them, grownups are going to pay attention. You don't want people to think you are a pedo, do you Sev?"

Severus started running on the gravel path that surrounded the edge of the park. He sure as hell didn't want to be confused for a pedophile. Wouldn't that be something? He barely even tolerated people in general and children in particular held no appeal whatsoever to him. In fact, of usual he couldn't care less about them. A harsh statement for someone who was a teacher by profession. Though, truth be told, he hadn't entered that career path entirely by choice. As a war criminal his career choices had been limited. Besides, of late his tastes seemed to have veered away from the living. Suddenly he was thankful of the hoody that hid his blushing cheeks.

He had somewhat come to terms with that. What he couldn't fathom was how on the nine circles of hell had he ended up in that kiddies' park in the first place? Of all places for Voldemort's former lieutenant to be found, that forsaken place was one of the worse. Why with a certain child with a notorious scar being bullied by an ugly fat kid not six feet away from the gravel trail where he was now running...

Severus stifled an exasperated moan. He wasn't supposed to know where the boy was. It had taken him the better part of July to make what he hoped were untraceable inquiries in order to figure it out and half of August to come up with a plan to approach the place undetected. Yet, if someone saw him there and recognized him, he'd be in a whole lot of trouble. And given the fact that his face had graced the pages of the Daily Prophet and of every public owlery in England on Most Wanted Posters throughout most of the war, it'd only take one curious wizard or witch to doom him. There was no way he would escape Azkaban a second time, not even through his relationship with Dumbledore, if he still had one after the Headmaster found out he had gone behind his back.

If that happened the Aurors would have a field day with him before handing him to the Dementors. Almost five years after what the Ministry trumpeted as Voldemort's demise, the detail of inept fools was no longer following him daily, but he still was on their crystal balls. There were some active Aurors who remembered the old days and who would have loved to have a go at the guy who had done away with their friends and family while he was a part of the Death Eaters. And yet there he was, risking his life and his freedom because the alleged ghost of the woman he had loved had looked up at him from his pillow with teary eyes and said that she missed her boy terribly and could he please, please let her have one tiny, little look at him.

Small children were not the only ones who had a hard time distinguishing reality from illusion. He growled under his breath. How do you call a twenty-six year old man who has an imaginary friend? More than a friend actually… He and his personal apparition had gotten really close over the last couple of months. For the first time in years Severus had gone back to the house in Spinner's End for the summer break and, along with a truckload of things that needed fixing, he had found that the occasional visitor that he had in his rooms at Hogwarts could follow him there and settle down as if the house were her own. That ghost was like no other he had met. He blushed some more.

Like everyone in the wizarding world he had heard of necromancers who consorted with the spirits of the dead, but consorted was usually understood to mean using the ghost to obtain information or to carry out small tasks. It was considered a Dark Art because it implied linking the soul of a dead person to the wizard's own soul and it was usually done with dishonest intentions. Like binding the spirit of someone recently deceased and use it to obtain information that betrayed the trust of someone who the ghost knew while he lived. Ghosts cannot actively lie, they can remain silent, but there are ways of making them speak. As for the tasks, say you had a ghost poison the food of your rival in the kitchen while you paraded yourself in front of the other guests in the dining room, thus creating an alibi.

Very few wizards were powerful enough to cast the soul spells needed to bind a ghost to them. And, in the relatively few cases in which a spirit failed to go through the veil, the dead were typically bound to a place of significance to them, either the place they had lived in or the place they had died in. The rumors went on, but what little actual knowledge there was of how to do the did was not enough to call it an art, dark or whatnot. Whatever experiments the chaps at Mysteries were doing in regards to the veil, the results were only known to a selected few. Death remained the great unknown. And most so called Necromancers were in reality posers who used illusions to con the feeble minded.

Now Severus with the unwitting help of the Headmaster and the dimwit Arithmancy teacher of Hogwarts had managed to attach a dead spirit to the soul he wasn't quite sure he had. Though Necromancers were supposed to be the ones wrangling the spirits and in his case he felt he was the one on a leash. The things that his particular haunting had done to him were writing a whole new chapter in the history of Necromancy. Not that he could ever publish that chapter in any serious magical publication. Aside from a certain section of _The Spruce Wizard Weekly _he'd always despised, he couldn't think of any periodical that would receive his musings. And he'd certainly never publish them under his own name. He swallowed down a bout of nervous laughter at the thought of it: _Dear Spruce Weekly, I've recently found myself sharing rooms with the naughtiest ghost ever…_

Of course there was another possibility: that the wish spell had created a very accomplished illusion of the woman he had loved and that he was slowly descending into madness by indulging in that illusion. Though if it all came from his mind, it was coming from part of him he had never been aware of and that tapped into depths of unfulfilled want he would have never thought he possessed.

He couldn't really figure out which scenario would be worse. Whatever the case, he knew he should stop, but that accomplished illusion was hard to deny. Every time he had tried that succubus had profited from his pent up desires to do things to him that effectively prevented him from exercising any resistance. After five years of the game, the apparition was a master at playing him like a fiddle. A twisted part of him enjoyed the music. Who was he kidding? A sick part of him craved it.

He forced himself to stop that line of thought and go back to the real issue: Insane, that's how you call a man who consorts with a ghost the way he did. Never mind that the ghost may have groundings on a wish spell gone awry. There was no way around it, he was off his trolley and should have been looking for help in riding himself of the curse while he still had a semblance of life, instead of...

"I thought you said he was well, Sev. He doesn't look happy at all. That awful fatty is bullying him."

He replied with barely moving lips, slowly enunciating each word: "I said the boy was alive, Lily. I never said anything about him being happy." He scoffed haughtily: "You grew up with Petunia. Honestly what were you expecting? And that awful boy came out of the same house your boy did. You may want to be kinder when you speak of your nephew."

The ghost frowned looking at the swings where the fat boy was twisting the arm of the boy in glasses behind his back: "You are probably right, he looks just like Vernon. I don't care who he is, he is hurting my Harry. Tell me again why shouldn't I go there and slap the little pig?"

His voice went so low that only the ghost could hear him: "Because if you do I swear on your grave that I'll quit Hogwarts and bury myself in the deepest jungle in Congo, where I'll devote the rest of my days to investigating odd plants and their properties and you'll never lay eyes on your boy ever again."

"Blimey Snape! You don't need to get your knickers in a bunch. Mine was a rhetorical question."

"Mine was a promise. Don't try me, Evans Potter. Cross the line and not even your little tricks will serve you to twist my arm into doing your bidding."

"Twist your arm, Severus, really? So now I'm a bully?!"

"You married into a family of them."

She hissed leaning towards him, brushing against his right arm: "Then you must be a masochist, because you seem to really get off on my little tricks. Just yesterday you were loudly..."

She didn't finish her quip, she yelped mid-sentence and disappeared as an old man in showy white, red and blue polyester sleeveless t-shirt and matching running shorts popped into existence on the other side of him. The old man seemed to have Apparated mid-jump. With a small jolt the man's slim legs landed on the gravel trail. He began running as soon as his tricolor Reebok GL 6000's touched the ground, making the royal blue pom poms on his ankle socks bounce rhythmically. He easily kept pace with Severus. The old man was in surprising good shape for someone who looked like a 60s relic, with a coltish built and a long grayish white mane tied on a loose ponytail; his broad forehead was capped with an equally loud tricolor band; and his long white beard was kept in check with a millefiori glass bead. He was wearing a pair of black aviator sunglasses to hide his eyes. The blue orbs the color of lighting would have been a dead giveaway. Still it only took a sideways glance for Severus to realize the man's identity.

He felt like a child who's been caught with his hand in the cookie jar. He muttered: "I can explain."

"I should expect you will, Severus, but you've already attracted enough unwanted attention, for now keep running," the man replied curtly.

It was the first straightforward order the man had given him since he had started working for him. Even when he was playing the double agent for that Machiavellian bastard, Dumbledore always managed to phrase everything as a polite suggestion. As if Severus Snape, a man eighty years his junior and in a very compromising position, had a say in what they were doing and could refuse him at his pleasure. Perhaps that was why he felt compelled to obey him.

* * *

Severus kept running and as he did the gravel turned into tarmac beneath his feet. The park gave way in a seamless transition to an empty rural dual carriageway. The outline of a group of rickety brick houses under a colliery chimney appeared first on the left road and the familiar silhouette of the church's tower showed on the right road just round the bend. Severus Snape's alchemist nose could perceive the familiar pungent smell of the Cokeworth River before he could see it. Dumbledore was bringing him home. He didn't know if he should feel relieved or afraid.

Dumbledore slowed down in the last leg of the road to the house in Spinner's End, keeping a leisurely tempo for about ten minutes. Whatever the man intended to do, he sure wasn't in a hurry. The only sounds that accompanied their journey were the beat of their sneakers on the pavement and the cadence of their breaths. Severus hesitated before entering Spinner's End proper, why he still cared about what the neighbors may think was beyond him, so he collected himself and pushed onwards. By the time he reached his door, Dumbledore was already there doing stretches.

He flickered Severus a quick grin while he measured his heartbeat with two fingers to his neck and a huge airborne golden pocket watch that looked like it had floated right out of Lewis Carroll. The size of the watch made Severus do a double take. Dumbledore noticed and replied to the unspoken question: "I'm old, Severus, I would need my reading glasses to make use of a smaller watch. I don't have them on me, I left home in a hurry," And then he punctuated: "You should stretch too. You have been running for about an hour now. One should always cool down after a run."

Dumbledore had even timed his run, so his spies must have picked him up since he was sitting in the convenience store. That man had a very impressive network. Severus had known that there was no way he had left the boy without some sort of vigilance. But he hadn't expected them to be good enough for him not to notice when he was being noticed. None of his magical warnings had gone off and to the best of his knowledge, he hadn't spotted anyone spying on him with more conventional means. Once more he had underestimated the Headmaster. That was something the man encouraged.

Some people think inside the box, some outside and for some, like that blasted man, the box was actually a tesseract spinning in the 4th dimension. The fourth dimension was an intriguing concept the old wizard had introduced him to. Dumbledore only looked the part of a scatter brain, but Severus Snape had never met anyone more focused, save perhaps Tom Riddle. Though Riddle was fixated with thoughts of glory, revenge and defeating death. Dumbledore's was a gyroscopic attention that could fix in several concurrent topics with different degrees of concentration, going back and forward with uncanny speed. And yet he was never superficial, his mind could dip deep into an issue and float right back like a cork, just to go into a completely different direction within seconds. Coupled with the wide array of subjects that caught the man's fancy, his mind was really hard to untangle.

Always with his permission, Severus had tried to follow the Headmaster's train of thoughts a couple of times out of curiosity. He'd barely managed to keep up with the Echeresque locomotive that followed demented trackless roads of physical impossibilities. He always felt his attempts at using Legilimens on the man left him more exposed than achieving the goal of exposing the other wizard. They always ended when he realized Dumbledore was looking at him. Each and every time he had broken his concentration to find the Headmaster's chilly blue eyes on him. His face usually sported the most disturbing look of understanding. The closest Severus could come to describing the feeling he got after one of those sessions was that he felt like he did in the teenager nightmares in which he looked down from the blackboard only to realize he was naked in front of his classmates. Every time Snape had tried to lay the other wizard's mind open, he was laid bare like a mollusk without shell.

He had often wondered if the reason Dumbledore was such a gifted Occlumens was that his mind felt like a really bad drug trip. With so much going on at any given time, Severus doubted anyone could read him in any meaningful way. It was just not worth it, so he had stopped trying.

"Can I stretch inside?" Dumbledore rose an eyebrow and Severus said: "I have nosy neighbors."

As if on cue a window's curtain cracked open in the house next door. Dumbledore shrugged and cleared the doorway with a slightly mocking bow.

Reining in his impatience at the old man's buffoonery, Severus flickered his wand and opened the door. He got in without turning around to see if the Headmaster had followed him. And he began stretching.

The sound of the door closing loudly behind his back startled him and made him look up at the Headmaster. The old man had taken off the sunglasses and hooked them on the front of his t-shirt. He was leaning against a wall with loosely crossed arms over his chest, one leg put forward, the other resting on the wall, waiting for him to finish.

When he noticed Severus was looking at him he planted both feet on the floor and spoke: "Would you mind if I get a glass of water? I'm thirsty after the work out."

It sounded like a reproach and Severus felt the need to defend himself: "Come now, Headmaster, this may not be the most hospitable abode, but you don't need to ask to cast _Aguamenti…" _He hesitated: "… unless you want me to do it for you?"

Dumbledore denied as he called forth a glass from the kitchen and filled it without making use of his wand: "I didn't came here to be waited on by you, Severus. But I'm an old fashioned man with an old fashioned sensibility. I hate to impose on others or abuse their hospitality. And you are one of the few wizards I know who fully understands the consequences that even the simplest transfiguration imposes in terms of dark energy displacement for all the wizards in the vicinity… I wouldn't dream of conjuring without asking first. It is common courtesy not to take what may not be willingly given."

Ah, so he was going straight for the jugular. Leave it to the old Headmaster to find the most convoluted way of calling him an ungrateful sot. Severus pinched the bridge of his nose while closing his eyes for the briefest moment to gather strength. Once more he was on the bench, having to explain himself to a hostile audience. Business as usual then, Severus Snape looked unfaltering at his accuser: "It is not what you think."

The Headmaster smirked: "So your Legilimens has finally vanquished my Occlumens. You have such a light touch that I didn't notice it."

He inhaled sharply: "I've given you no reason to mock me, Professor Dumbledore."

Dumbledore sighed: "I'm sorry if I've offended you, Professor Snape. You are not the first to tell me I have an inopportune sense of humor. I was just wondering, if you are not using Legilimens on me, what makes you so sure you know what I'm thinking right now?"

He bowed a little: "Headmaster, let me assure you that even using Legilimens I wouldn't dream of presuming to know what is going on inside your head. I cannot figure out how is it that you do."

Albus Dumbledore laughed, unbridled, head tossed back, tears welling up his wrinkled eyes, midriff shaking. And when he was done, mirth still lighting up his countenance, he said: "It's not always easy. My mind does tend to fill to the brim, which is why I find keeping a Pensieve so useful… Why don't we start with what I'm not thinking then? I'm not thinking that you have betrayed me. I'm not thinking you went to search for Harry Potter with the intention to harm him. And I'm certainly not thinking that you are a dangerous Necromancer especially when you are dressed like a Muggle angst filled adolescent. Wherever did you find that outfit?"

Severus Snape was irked but the tension in his shoulders relaxed a bit, enough for him to feel sufficiently confident to scan the Headmaster's tacky outfit from head to toe with a raised eyebrow.

The gesture was followed by another more moderate bout of laughter from Dumbledore. At least someone was enjoying the exchange. Once he caught his breath, the Headmaster went serious: "Regardless, I have a moral obligation towards the boy and towards the people who trust me as the acting chief of the Order of the Phoenix. So I must ask: what were you doing out there in the company of what I'm told was an unbound ghost, Severus?"

He didn't even ponder before replying with the truth: "We…" He cut himself short, cursing his stupidity for confirming what could have only been a suspicion that the man had no way of verifying. Dumbledore had the oddest effect on him. He rectified: "I just wanted to have a look at the boy."

Dumbledore seemed not to notice the _faux pas_, but with that man you could never know: "You don't strike me as the kind of man who gambles his life for the sake of mere curiosity. What was the hurry to have a look at the boy? You know he is going to come to Hogwarts in a couple of years, you just had to bid your time and you could have your fill of him as a student."

Severus Snape drew breath in, this time he gave himself a few seconds to think, but quickly decided that it was simpler to say the truth, or part of it: "I wanted to see him now because he is her son and I wanted to see how much of her he had in him."

The Headmaster nodded pensively: "I see…" He sighed: "Please believe that there is nothing further from my mind than prying into your privacy, Severus. But the personal connection can work both ways, for the boy is also his son. So once again I'm compelled to ask: Whose ghost was with you?"

He stiffened: "I'd rather not tell. It is private and has no bearing on the matter of the child's safety."

Dumbledore nodded again: "Fine, can you at least assure me that it is not one of your former Death Eater associates or anyone who would ally with Tom Riddle?"

"I can, you have my word that the ghost is not a Death Eater nor Voldemort's ally. I can also assure you neither the ghost nor I mean ill to the boy."

"Are you aware that dealing with ghosts is a very dangerous business?"

He chortled in disbelief: "Is the Order of the Phoenix concerned for my safety now?"

"It depends on what you understand by concern. Despite popular belief I do have a personal life and I was not immediately available when the message alerting of your excursion arrived. It was received by other members of the Order. Regretfully they didn't see it in the same light I do. So I'm not speaking in the name of the Order when I express concern for you. Severus, I may be overstepping my boundaries here and, if I am, you have my deepest apology. But over the past years I have hoped that our relationship has evolved from mere colleagues into one of a more personal nature. I have come to consider you a friend and I'm worried about you."

He didn't know how to reply to that, he didn't try.

Dumbledore searched his eyes with those blue beams of his but when Severus refused to meet them, he had swung his head from left to right: "I don't want to impose on you any longer, I shall leave you now."

With a swish of his index finger the glass of water he had been drinking from went to the sink, was washed thoroughly with a soapy sponge, rinsed and set gently on the dish rack.

Severus Snape watched in disbelief: "That's it, you are just going to ask me a couple of questions and take my word on it? Aren't you afraid that I'll go right back?"

Dumbledore smiled: "What would be the point in asking you anything, if I couldn't take your word on it? I trust you. And I trust your intelligence to not take that unnecessary risk again. I'm expected back for brunch and I don't want to keep my friend waiting. He has a very busy schedule and so do I, so we don't get to see each other as much as we'd want. Before I leave, though, I've been casting left and right and I would like to renew my space pocket spell before using yet another Portkey."

"You need a Portkey to go home?" He caught himself too late. What was it about Albus Dumbledore that made him feel and act like an eight year old? He sighed: "Sorry, it is not of my business. I didn't mean to pry."

"For reasons entirely beyond my control I seem to be famous nowadays. I deal with it the best I can, but I won't impose that on my friend. It would be hard to keep our privacy living here, so we don't. I only use the rooms in Hogwarts when I'm unable to commute home. We own a house in Gibraltar, which is still British, an Overseas Territory. Portkeys are theoretically easier to trace so the Ministry requires you to use them for any form of overseas travel. I try to be a law abiding citizen in as much as possible. But Portkeys at times conflict with the use of a space pocket. Of usual I wouldn't be bothered about a minute loss of matter, but I have something rather delicate inside my pouch now. My friend and I arrived home in the early morning and, when news of your escapade reached me, I had to leave in a hurry and I forgot to take it out. Would you mind if I cast the renewal here before I leave?"

"By all means do, and help yourself to any material component you may need. You'll find anything you require in the shelves right there."

"That is very kind of you," he said as he took out a canvas of about 24 by 18 inches from his pouch. The painting was covered with a cloth tarp. Dumbledore levitated it with his wand while he looked around, until his eyes fixed on a couch in the living room: "Would it be too much trouble if I set it over this couch for a moment while the spell is ready?"

"Go ahead." He agreed and then curiosity got the better of him: "Can I ask what it is?"

Dumbledore smiled coyly and Snape had to blink to make sure he wasn't seeing things.

The older wizard answered while he renewed the space pocket spell: "This is embarrassing. The painting is an extravagant birthday gift. Due to the war we didn't have a chance to properly celebrate my 100th birthday. So we decided to do something especial for my 105th, we've been in the International Chamber Music Festival in _Breiteneich Schloss_ in Horn, Austria all week. Since the school year is upon us, for a grand finale, last night we dined on my favorite _waterzoï_ at _Graindorge _and then we took a stroll down _Champs Elysees_. I know going to Paris to have Flemish food sounds demented, but I like the place and love their shellfish soup. And I was the birthday boy, after all. Why was I telling you all these? Oh right, the painting... When we reached _La Place de l'Étoile_ my friend presented me with this glorious canvas. Afterwards we went to the Roundhouse in London. Since the non-magi abandoned it in 1983 it has become a vampire venue. I'm an old acquaintance of the lead singer and the drummer of the band Hemophilia, you might have heard of them, their new album Bleed has been on the wizarding radio… No? In any case they are a very charming half-vampire couple and they invited us to watch them perform. The cocktails in that place are surprisingly good, given that most patrons don't drink alcohol. Except if you count, shall we say second hand? I don't know if you are aware that vampire bites have an effect that is similar to some opiates on the donor, without the detrimental secondary effects of such substances. I don't mind helping dear friends and that is an added perk. But we must have overdone it last night, because I crashed in bed dressed as soon as we arrived home and completely forgot to take the painting out of the pouch. I only slept a couple of hours and barely had wits enough to conjure this running outfit." Smiling wickedly he finished: "If you think this makes me look barmy, imagine me apparating wearing a bloodstained tuxedo in the middle of Little Whinging. Vladislav's table manners leave some to be desired."

Severus felt overwhelmed by the barrage of information, it was hard to process and when he did, he felt wretched: "I'm sorry, Professor Dumbledore, did I just ruin your birthday party?"

"Oh no, not at all. Nothing could have ruined this birthday party. I've been having a couple of months' worth of fun. I didn't expect my friend to go all out, but I'd lie if I said I didn't enjoy myself." He giggled: "And we didn't even need to use the Felix we'd brewed."

Merlin's wand! Snape looked befuddled at the most feared wizard in the world who had just giggled like a schoolgirl and admitted nonchalantly to befriending dark beings and using illegal potions. This was a completely unexpected side of the Headmaster.

"Would you like to see it, Severus?"

"I beg your pardon?" he replied, feeling quite confident that no, he didn't want to know anything else of the colorful personal life that people didn't believe the Headmaster had.

It was disturbing enough to know that the Supreme Mugwump of the International Confederation of Wizards and Chief Warlock of the Wizengamot had a scar which could only come from a magical tattoo in the shape of the London underground over his left knee –clearly visible with those horrid shorts he was wearing- and that the man knew of the effects of vampire bites and opiates from firsthand experience. Of all the people in the world that he could have imagined as party animals the Headmaster was not even on the list.

"The painting… Would you like to see the painting?"

That sounded innocent enough: "I don't know the first thing about art, but I'd like to see it, if you don't mind showing me."

Dumbledore took off the cloth tarp covering and revealed the naked figure of a woman who sat on a pedestal. She was cradling a swan's head as the bird flew towards her with outstretched wings. Snape recognized the mythological motif of the Spartan queen Leda, who had been seduced by Zeus in the guise of a swan. Oh boy, the Headmaster was full of surprises.

Albus Dumbledore looked at the canvas lovingly: "I first saw this painting in 1949 thanks to Prince Matila Ghyka. We met during his ministry in the UK. The prince was born in 1881 too, though in Romania. He died in 1965 but we shared a common interest in the golden proportion. He was the mathematician who calculated the harmonics for the artist and when I first saw the painting I was quite taken by it. I was dealing with the backlash of some personal issues and this image helped me get back on my feet. The friend who gave it to me has recently managed to be of service to the artist, Salvador Dalí, and when the man's gratitude offered to repay him, he remembered how much I like this painting. The artist is notoriously greedy, André Breton made an anagram of his name calling him _avida dollars_ for his cupidity. I can only imagine what my friend must have done to get him to agree. For sure it was not copied by hand but casting _Gemino_, still it is a perfect twin. I wouldn't want to risk damaging it."

Severus inspected the painting and said: "That's odd, everything is weightless. Not even the water is touching the sand."

Dumbledore chuckled: "You are very observant Severus, most people feel estrangement in front of the painting but it takes them a while to notice why. That is those who do not censor it outright. They focus on the naked woman and the beast, even if it is implied that Zeus is an Animagus. And even though it is a calculated staging, in which every single element was placed with a purpose in mind and which was made according to the specifications of Fra Luca Paccioli's treatise _De divina proportione_ (Of Divine Proportions). Most people think the whole thing is…" He paused in search of a euphemism and settled on: "off color. Dalí does have a penchant for theatricality and he loves to shock traditionalists."

"You don't have to be observant at all to notice the oddness or the purposefulness of it, this is quite obviously staged and it is clear the mythological theme is just a device."

The Headmaster smiled approvingly: "Indeed, but you'd be surprised at just how many people dismiss it as pornographic. I will coincide there are erotic undertones, though not in the sense of indecency." He laughed softly: "Only a true artist can turn a scientific insight into erotic poetry."

"Huh?"

"Dalí was well aware of the advancements in physics on regards to the discontinuous nature of matter, as well as the probabilistic models that explain the particles constituent of it. And in this painting he turns that into a comment on the nature of connectedness and intimacy. It is true that nothing really touches anything else in the painting. The Spartan queen, for whom the artist's wife was the model, floats an inch above the pedestal that floats above the water and the sand that do not touch each other. Dalí brings forth the reality of separateness to make a point. Look at Leda, Severus, her hand seems to cradle the swan's head but falls just short of it. And the swan's wings speak of an embrace that won't happen for it is physically impossible for matter to merge. The Universe has more void than matter in it and yet…"

"And yet…?"

"And yet our need to reach out and connect is so great that we still try. Even in the face of certain defeat we try and there is a measure of triumph in the sole attempt."

"I don't think I'm following you."

"Love is both journey and destination. And love is never futile, Severus"

He scoffed: "Please, Headmaster, I hardly think that what amounts to a depiction of bestiality can pass for the paragon of love."

"Depictions of Leda and The Swan usually fall in one of two types: a violent rape, like the one you will find in WB Yeats poem in which the hapless girl yields to the superior force of the god or a prurient rendering of an act of perversion found in cameos, engraved gems and oil lamps kept in bed chambers for the purpose of titillating the senses. Hitler is said to have kept Paul Mathias Padua raunchy version in his bedroom. But this painting is different. There is a wealth of tenderness in Leda's gesture and the swan, though still a beast, does not seek to impose with his embrace. Love sanctifies even the basest engagement and we stand in the presence of love here, Severus. Dalí manages to make Leda and the transmutted Zeus into a couple, in despite of their obvious differences and of the physical impossibility of becoming one, they become an inseparable twosome and a motif to pursue our dreams."

He didn't know what to say, so he shrugged it off.

And then Dumbledore did something completely unexpected, with one stride he closed the gap between them and grabbed his face by both cheeks. His touch was gentle, but Severus Snape was too shocked to do anything but stare transfixed at the crazy wizard's lighting blue eyes that were uncomfortably close to his.

His breath brushed his face as he spoke hurriedly: "Merlin knows I should hold my peace. But I can't stand aside while a young man of your potential wastes away chasing smoke. I understand more than most that wounds that run deep need time to heal. I also know that the best way of pushing someone away is giving them unsolicited advice. There is so much light inside you that it would pain me to see you throw it away on the shadows in your head. You are too young to turn your back on life, Severus. Don't let the weight of your guilt prevent you from moving forward…" He sniggered: "Like I'm one to talk." He pulled away and put the painting back in his pouch: "Now for sure I've overstayed my welcome." He gave him a sad little smile as he opened the door: "Please try not to hold this against me. As a matter of fact, let us chuck it up to me still being out of sorts from yesterday's libations."

The Headmaster disapparated and the ghost appeared before he had regained his bearings.

"Well what about that? Albus Dumbledore is gay. I should have known. I remember thinking that the man was a catch when they showed us his pictures from when he defeated Grindelwald. I couldn't figure out why he wasn't married. Wonder who this posh friend of his is? Someone rich, for sure, if he can take him all over the map and give him that kind of gift. Famous too, if they have to live abroad, though the fact that they are both men may account for it. The wizarding world is not known for its tolerance… Imagine that, being friends with a prince. Staying a week in Austria, dining in Paris and having drinks with a half-vampire rock band, plus a one of a kind gift for the birthday boy." She laughed bitterly: "I had to beg James to take me to Madame Popina's when I turned 20. I've never really liked birthdays and the last thing you want when you are facing your own mortality is to have to cast _Scourgify_ on a mountain of dishes because your husband's idea of fun is celebrating home with friends, his friends, mind you. Guess I wasn't the sort of girl you'd…"

Snape was not paying attention to her. His mind was holding onto two pieces of crucial information: The ghost was real, at least real enough for others to see her and for that bloody Machiavellian wizard to know exactly who she was either by deduction or by a glimpse. And she was the same, just as she hadn't in life, she didn't care a whit for him. He had risked his life for her to have a glimpse of her son. He had jeopardized the relationship with the only person alive who still believed in him. And all she could think about was what a sad lot she had gotten in life because she hadn't gone to Paris for her bloody birthday?! Severus Snape had little experience on what love is, but he had abundant experience on what it is not and in all the many ways in which people try to pass lesser goods for the real article.

The next coherent thoughts he had were, first: _What was I thinking?_ And the second was the realization that he hadn't been thinking at all. He had been letting that succubus drag him by his nether regions. And if he let her, she would keep doing it until he was dead and buried too. The conclusion his sharp mind, which was built to favor the Gordian knot solution, came to was lapidary:_ I can't let that happen. __Whatever this is, it__ ends now._

With a swish of his wand he changed the stupid Muggle outfit for a fleece robe and with another swish turned the tracker suit into a pile of cleaning rags. He was going to burn the sneakers, but that would have to wait. Without pause he opened the door in the bookcase that led upstairs, he went to the bathroom with the ghost trailing behind him. He didn't bother closing the door as he filled up the bathtub.

"Come on, Sev! You can't be angry at me. What was I supposed to do when Dumbledore apparated? It would have been worse for you if I had stayed."

He took off the robe and got in the tub without giving any indication that he could hear or see her. Not even when the ghost frowned, nor when its clothes disappeared and she got inside the tub with him. He laid down his head on the edge, closed his eyes tightly and thought about the process of making pimple-curing potions, beginning with the extraction of the bubotuber pus. And when the ghost rubbed against him, he retreated deep within his mind, just like he did when his father was beating him.

The ghost finally gave up and stood with flashing silver eyes. She spat at him: "This isn't over, Sev."

As she disappeared, he allowed himself a smirk. He thought, while lathering a cloth on his homemade cedarwood soap and vigorously washing his back: _Ah, but my dear, it is._

_**AN:**__ OK, despite what Snape wants to think. No, it's not over by far. But I wrote this chapter because I felt there has been an imbalance in the last two and he doesn't strike me like the kind of man who'd allow anyone to treat him like a lap dog. This evens the field but the game is just beginning. And now, for a rather lengthy afterword you are all welcomed to skip: _

_Thanks for the review, knowing someone is enjoying one of my fics always makes me happy. Happy enough to answer what is clearly a rhetorical question: I'm glad you didn't ask, Frank, you've guessed right that magic in my version of the HP Universe is indeed bounded more explicitly by the laws of physics, but the change is not significant, me thinks. I'm actually proposing magic is a fifth fundamental interaction that fits in The Standard Model and ties in with the existence of more energy and matter than expected (dark matter-dark energy). According to me the magic boson is the ultimate carrier particle, capable of defying our current understanding by interacting between all other fundamental forces. I think that way I can handle a whole lot better the time traveling, transmutations and the apparent defiance of thermodynamics of magic in canon HP. _

_You don't need any of those assumptions to read my fics, but I do need to have some guidelines to write them. This is the only way this poor Raving-claw can work things out. I like my flights of fancy to end in safe landings instead of obstreperous crashes. I'm slightly obsessive too, for example: I'm fretting because though the Reebok GL 6000 was indeed released in 1986, I'm not sure it was before the summer. So it is within the realm of possible I have Albus wearing anachronistic footwear and while I'm sure no one gives a damn about it, I kinda do. The point is that I love JK, but the way she introduced time traveling in her universe had me bracing for a very rough landing. _

_I hold onto the belief that anything but a universe bounded by clear rules will go chaotic pretty fast, magic or no magic, chaos is bad, in fics as much as in life. Entropy is what gives a direction to time, as our Universe travels inexorably into dissolution. It is so beautiful that every single life form is fighting against inertia (the tendency to return to prior states of chaos). For me that is pure poetry. I've posted a better explanation in my profile of what I think is the science in magic. I mostly use it for an ongoing Gelbus fic but it works for this one too… And yeah, I'm working out a thought experiment to explain magic through science because that is just how crazy I am._

_Now on how much this story actually fits canon, understood as timeline, locales, characterization and such, I usually try not to divert too much from it, again I'm obsessive; but I do take liberties like changing Cokeworth into a Black Country coal town instead of the textile town that is depicted in the novels. Hey, it is still in the Midlands and by the 1980s it could have been both. Anyways, much as the Kurosawa's 1950 film called Rash__ō__mon in which 4 different people tell 4 different tales about the same rape-murder, I think the versions of any event depend greatly upon who is telling the story. I'm taking Snape's perspective and back then he was not the most reliable narrator. My Severus is experiencing either the visitation of an undead entity or some form of mental breakdown… _

_The jury is still out on that one. He is powerful enough to fool others into thinking his delusions are real. And he is in his twenties. I do hold to a bioelectric explanation of how magic works within the human body, so it could very well be a textbook case of schizophrenia. I have some thoughts on it and on the Obscurial Syndrome. Keeping it short I think a certain mutation of their acethylcholine receptors makes wizards and witches more prone to certain neurological illness like schizophrenia and epilepsy, and since some of their cells act as very nifty Na-K capacitors, if left unchecked they can short or even go bum-bum. But those ideas are still a work in progress, I've just recently started reading about neuroplasticity. The idea that people can alter their delta waves by will is so exciting!_

_Mental health issues –mine and the characters'- aside, we all curate our memories to fit into our self-service or self-disservice narratives. We can only explain ourselves ex-post facto and the way we feel about it colors the way we remember what happened. Say that you are burdened by guilt, you will see all through those particular lense__s__. I think that is the value of stopping once in a while to take a walk down memory lane and reassess things from a firmer footing as you grow older and, hopefully, wiser. Shedding new light on old wounds can really help heal them. Severus Snape is growing up in this fic, so his perspective on his guilt and his relationship with Lily is going to become more nuanced, as it should. I really like him so I hope to be able to do justice to his journey._

_Finally Yikes! This chapter came within an inch of veering into a Snapledore. I've never thought of that as a viable couple and now my fingers itch of want to write one… Anyways, I think I managed to salvage the chapter in the name of character development and the next is going to be pure Snily goodness. _


	4. Chapter 4

Visitation

"_It doesn't hurt me  
Do you want to feel how it feels?  
Do you want to know? Know that it doesn't hurt me  
Do you want to hear about the deal that I'm making?  
You, it's you and me  
And if I only could I'd make a deal with god  
I'd get him to swap our places…  
Be running up that road…  
Be running up that hill..."  
Kate Bush ('Running up That Hill,' song in the album Hounds of Love 1985.)_

Chapter IV: Avowal

Seventh year Alice Selwyn was running late getting back to the Slytherin common room. She had been in Hogsmeade on a date with Richard Fawley and they had lost track of time. The boy had finally gotten the nerve to ask her to marry him and, after she said yes, they both felt like spending some quality time alone together. They had profited from both being of age to engage rooms in the Three Broomsticks Inn. Madam Rosmerta was not nosy, if you could cast without setting off traces and had enough galleons to pay the bill, she didn't meddle in other people's business. If you wanted to pay for a whole night and only use the room for a few hours that was entirely up to you.

They had barely made it before curfew and had parted ways in the dungeons, because she had to take care of some business in the lady's room. It was her first time casting a contraceptive spell and, even though her mum had gone through it with her several times, Alice had been so nervous she just couldn't be sure she had done it right. Charms were her weakest subject. Though just like cosmetic glamors, this wasn't a spell that they taught you at school. School teaches very little of use. That is why she needed to go to her back up plan.

Mum had been adamant that Selwyn's do not have babies out of wedlock or even too close to wedlock. You have to be mindful of what other people thinks. Mum and daddy would climb up a tree if Alice ruined her wedding to the Fawley's with a christening too close to it, let alone with an unsightly belly showing under her white dress. Blimey, she would climb up a tree herself, if she ruined her chance of strutting around in a tight fae weaved wedding dress in front of all her friends and acquaintances. She already knew the model she wanted. That is why she had bought that potion from a classmate.

The girl was a foul Shyverwretch's. What were they, six or seven siblings between boys and girls? They bred like rabbits, odd because the potion to prevent it was supposedly the family's specialty. Nana had warned her the whole lot of them were poisoners. She trusted nana and of usual she shopped from Slug Jiggers like sensible people do. But word had it that particular girl's potions were the best for what she had in mind. She had been told that it would work up to a day after… well, you know? But just to be on the safe side, Alice intended to use the vial in her pocket as soon as she could.

The potion was the kind that needed to be applied in… uh…. privacy. She could have gone to the bathroom in the common room. But on a Sunday at that hour she was bound to find a whole lot of girls there, tending to their nightly _toilette_ and gossiping about their dates. She didn't know if the potion was going to do something weird that someone may notice. She didn't want to risk anyone, especially the obnoxious Head Girl Delia Alistair, getting whiff of what she was doing. That oversized prude tomboy was bound to have an opinion and she was not ready to shut her filthy mouth by saying that she now had the Fawley's Enchanted Ruby Ring that Richard had given her in the gold chain around her neck.

Yes, she had taken it off her finger as soon as they finished saying their good nights. Lord and Lady Fawley sounded like music to her ears, but for now that music was for her ears alone. For ours, she mentally corrected, for they were an "us" now, officially. She could still feel Richard's hot breath whispering those magical words -I love you Lady Fawley- to her right after… you know? She had replied saying she loved him too, calling him Lord Fawley and that had been the best part of it. She was a good girl, so she didn't really have points of comparison, other than the naughty novels Bell had lent her. But it all had been rather quicker and a bit more painful than the novels let on. Still those five little words made up for all of it. Even thinking of them made her shiver pleasantly.

The only thing better than hearing those words would be being called Alice Fawley Countess of Fallowleah. Not that she wished any ill to befall her future father and mother in law. Merlin forbid those stupid words ever slipped from her lips in company. Better to perish the thought, for now. And let the grandparents of her future children live a long healthy life. Not freakishly long though, because she wanted to still be young and beautiful when she got the title. But long enough… you know? Alice spit thrice on it for good luck and then buried the thought so deep within that not even the best Legilimens could find it.

Her handsome Richard could be so incredibly sweet, and he was really hers now. He was a decent boy and had showed her a signed draft of the marriage contract before they…you know? He had advised her to let her lawyers review it before she signed it. The fact that he and his dad had already signed was a show of goodwill. Besides the marriage contract was pretty standard and even she could understand most of it. She hadn't spotted any unusual clause. But mum would kill her if she signed it before the lawyers could go over it.

Truth be told, she couldn't wait to shout it from the belfry. But she couldn't just yet, at least not until her family lawyers had cleared the documents. She couldn't wait to be able to tell all her friends about it. Perhaps she could tell Bell right away in confidence. After all, they were best friends. Of course she'd have her make a vow before she did tell her. Knowing Bell she wasn't going to be able to resist.

Alice felt like dancing at the thought of it: a victory dance. Bell was going to be green with envy. Not even notorious Belvina Flint could hope for a better match than she had just made. And Alice didn't have a team of beauticians and marriage counselors working for her 24, 7. Bell received more daily owls with vials and phials than some people got over the whole year. Save for mum and nana, Alice was basically on her own. Things could get hairy between the proposal and the actual wedding for the contract included the standard good reputation clause. Mum had made her memorize what a good reputation entailed. She had to be cautious, so she decided to use the bathroom in the dungeons.

She had hoped that the dungeons would be empty, but was shocked by what she had found in the bathroom. She had never liked ghosts, but what those two were doing in there was so unladylike… She shuddered. Those two obviously didn't know what a good reputation means and they probably didn't care anymore, being dead and all. She needed to go tell a teacher. If it were entirely up to her, she would have walked away and tried to forget what she had seen; but that stupid ghost, the pimply one with the awful paste glasses that usually hunted the second floor girls' bathroom, had recognized her from that time she and Richard had snogged there. That thing had gone fetch a prefect and bad luck had it she had found Delia, who had nagged at both of them. That bloody ghost girl knew her name!

Alice wasn't going to ruin what was so far the best night of her young life by risking people finding out she had been skulking in the dungeon's bathroom trying to make use of a shady potion. The most reasonable course of action was to go tell her House Head and let the man handle it. If she denounced those ghosts no one would believe anything they said against her. She'd just have to deny it all and that would be it. Professor Snape was the last person she wanted to see, but it couldn't be helped.

She sighed a big despondent sigh before she knocked on the man's office. Merlin, who works on a Sunday? That man didn't have a life, which was not really surprising for he was grouchy, sulky and that greasy hair and sallow skin of his gave Alice the shivers, the bad kind. She always kept her creamy complexion and golden locks impeccable. Richard had told her he loved that her skin was like fresh milk and that her hair was like molten gold. She made a note of looking up the word molten in the dictionary the first chance she had. A proper lady should know that kind of thing.

The door swung open and she cleared her throat, which suddenly felt dry: "Uh, Professor Snape…"

"Yes, Miss Selwyn?"

That man always sounded annoyed at her. Fine, she would admit that she wasn't the best student of her year, but she certainly wasn't the worst and she tried to keep her nose clean. Besides Alice had always been told she was cute and lovable. Why did that awful man dislike her? She took some comfort from the idea that in a few months she would be Lady Fawley living in wonderful Fallowleah Hall, with all the beautiful dresses and expensive Goblin jewelry her heart could desire, tended by six house elves, having a Pegasus carriage at her disposal. Passing her days in the lap of luxury without a care in the world and that lousy man would still be teaching at stupid Hogwarts, bending his back over a smelly cauldron.

Yes, the old bat would be in the dungeon and the beautiful lady would be up in the castle, which is how things were supposed to be. Maybe mum and dad would let her skip the couple of N.E.W.T.S she was supposed to take. She didn't really need books and exams anymore. She could learn all that she needed to know in real life. Weddings are important affairs and there would be tons of things to do. The world was a bright and charming place and she only needed to relay the information and go on with her wonderful life.

What had happened with Richard had made her feel all grown up. But just being in front of the Head of House was enough to make her feel like a stupid little girl again.

She hated herself for it, but couldn't help muttering a nervous: "Professor, there's…" She paused in search for the best way of describing what she had witnessed.

The man replied sounding truly exasperated, as if Alice had interrupted him doing something important and not busy with that magical crow quill of his, grading papers or writing who knows what boring thing about potions, which everyone knew was not even real magic in the first place.

"Yes, Miss Selwyn."

It was better to expedite: "There are a couple of ghosts haunting the dungeon girls' bathroom."

He frowned meanly: "Ghosts are nothing but resonances of the past, you are a seventh year and should know this. Their apparent sentience is only that: apparent. If you are feeling…" He paused significantly: "...shy about using the lavatory with them around, then you should make use of the one in the common room. That one is ghost free. Though there is an 18th century magical painting which is about the same. If you had passed your O.W.L.s with grades that had allowed you to take advanced courses in charms, you would know the same magical principle that makes magic paintings work, makes ghosts exist. But since you didn't, you may be yet protected by your ignorance."

The painting in question was of the Goblin Rebel Urg the Unclean being subdued by Minister Damocles Rowle and both the wizard and the goblin were ugly enough to make anyone pee shy, which is why the Slytherin girls turned the painting around to face the wall when they went to the loo in the common room. But, oh so smart Professor Snape didn't know that.

_For the love of Merlin, spare me the lesson, you wanker_, Alice thought, out loud she said: "These resonances are pissed blind in the lavatory. They are bellowing something about a guy doing right and giving them money like other men do. One is that hideous girl that usually hunts the second floor girls' bathroom and the other one is a half-naked disgrace I've never seen before. With those clothes she looks like a courtesan. I guess she is what some would call pretty. Her hair is not that bad. The haircut looks cheap, but the hair looks reddish silver when it catches the light. I've never seen a ghost like that before. It is shocking that one of those women died here! Wonder who her… uh… patron was?"

Professor Snape cut her short: "Ghosts are no longer alive and are therefore excused of the wages of sin. Which means that they cannot get drunk, Miss Selwyn."

In a surprising moment of insight, she replied with accurate logic: "I don't see why not, if they are the same as magical paintings. Mum hid the painting of great uncle Rufus in the attic because he was a drunkard who sang raunchy songs in front of company when he was worst from it. His painting is also a pervert, the nymphs in the dining room painting are terrified of him. Talking of perverts and drunks, the Fat Friar was bringing that pair another bottle of Firewhiskey when I found them. Though they weren't drunk enough to let fatso grope them, if you ask me, it is only a matter of time before they are." She caught the man's mortified look at that last part and smiled meanly: "Don't take my word on it, go and see for yourself. Unless you'd rather wait until you have a full blown ghost orgy in there."

Alice didn't wait for an answer. She had delivered her message, so she turned around and left. She felt a momentary satisfaction at seeing the man sliding, billowing cloak and all, hurriedly down the corridor. Served him right for trying to school her on a Sunday. But her mind was pretty soon occupied with more important things. She wanted to have time to use the potion, then she had to brush her hair a hundred times and put some bowtruckle oil on it. And then she needed to take off all her cosmetic glamors and put on the finest Veela- made night cream she owned.

Until her wedding day she had to take especial care of herself. There were sure to be reporters of the Daily Prophets society section attending and she wanted to look her very best in every single picture. She giggled to herself. If she hurried, she would still catch Bell awake. For once Belvina Flint was the one who was going to be jealous of her and not the other way around. Alice smiled maliciously and completely forgot about the bloody ghosts and the sulky old bat. Or she would have, if it weren't for another unfortunate encounter. She bumped into Delia Alistair.

The dark blond tomboy stood in Alice's way and addressed her in her Quidditch captain harsh, almost manly, voice: "Well, well, well, if it isn't Alice Selwyn, you are late for the row call." Then she said, sounding really pleased with herself: "Do you have one of your fanciful excuses to explain why or should I just go ahead and give you detention?"

Alice put her index finger over her pout and feigned innocence: "I have an excuse, one that is the honest to Merlin truth: I was with the Head of House reporting a ghost commotion in the dungeon girls' bathroom. You can ask Professor Snape yourself, when he comes back. He went there right away."

Delia frowned with those hideous centipede eyebrows of hers. That woman had never heard of a hair removal spell in her whole sad life. Which proves that you could be a champion in school charms without actually knowing any of the truly important spells. Alice swore that one of these days those eyebrows were going to crawl right out of that girl's plain long face and attack somebody.

"What ghost commotion? What does that even mean? Wait, he went right away?" She bit her thin, almost inconsequential, lips: "You don't think he is in danger, do you?"

Alice shrugged it off, she didn't care, not at all: "You can probably catch up with him if you run..." Inwardly she sniped: _Then you teacher's pet can lick the man's bum. Do us all a favor and pull out the stick while you are at it. _

She entered the Slytherin common room without looking back and made it quickly downstairs to go fetch her cosmetic train case, a gorgeous Stowe Packers original endless storage, which Richard had given her for her birthday last May. Jackpot, Bell was still awake, making a first year feel small for smearing one of her precious crude silk pajamas with a chocolate frog. She decided on the spot that her nightly beauty routine could wait for a little while longer. Oh this was going to be good, so good. She fluffed her curls, pinched some color into her cheeks, straightened her back and cat-walked towards Belvina with a triumphant smile on her China doll face. Lady Fawley was in the House.

Severus Snape went down the corridor with a feeling of foreboding that tightened his chest tighter and tighter as he reached the bathroom's door and was able to listen in to a loud conversation between the ghosts that girl Alice Selwyn had told him about.

A shrill voice was drunkenly moaning: "Back when I died the only thing I had going for me was my unwavering admiration for Miss Peggy Lee. I always knew she was going to be a star. Did you know that she appeared uncredited in _Stage Door Canteen _with Katherine Hepburn? It's true, she played with The Benny Goodman Orchestra, looking pretty as a picture. The scoop was published in _Movie Story_ that summer and that magazine always got it right. Mum sent a monthly owl with it, in spite of it being really hard to get and in spite of those bastards at the owlery hassling her for being a Muggle. I knew that movie was going to be my chance to see Miss Peggy Lee perform. It was 1943 so everything was rationed or pricy back then. It took a lot to save enough for a ticket to the premier."

"I imagine," came the muted reply.

The shrilly voice didn't seem to have heard the muted voice: "But I had managed somehow, when that idiot Olive Hornby found she had scored four points less than me in the Astronomy exam. I know Ravenclaws are supposed to be really smart, but, darling, I was never above average in anything but Astronomy. And that was only because papa had been a sailor and he taught me all he knew about stars. Far good it did me, that cow Olive couldn't stand me being better than her at anything, so she went around telling everyone that my hideous glasses were hand-me-downs. I was so ashamed that I went running to cry my eyes out in the second floor's bathroom. And then that boy came in and conjured something awful. I don't really remember how he killed me, but I remember the killer's voice. I'm positive it was a boy. All men are dogs."

The muted voice spoke louder and Snape recognized Lily as she slurred: "Dogs the lot of them..."

"That boy really screwed me over. Not only did he killed me, but he did it eleven days before the movie premiered in the States and four weeks before it premiered here. I didn't get to see it for two whole years. Just four bloody weeks… And I didn't get to see it until after the Ministry bounded me to Hogwarts. It was part of my agreement. I left that idiot Olive and her family alone." She laughed meanly: "Should have seen them running in her brother's wedding while I threw them used toilet paper balls. I let them be in exchange for not being exorcised and them letting me watch the movie in my own private showing with a full size screen and two bags of Butterkist toffee popcorn. Those were my favorite snack. I couldn't eat them anymore, but it was the principle of it. I made that Auror replay Miss Peggy Lee's scene over and over until he said that he'd had enough of it and that he'd join the task force and face Grindelwald gladly, rather than spending one more second in my awful company. I'd been through so much already, but he couldn't let me have my fun. They are all arse-holes, I tell you."

"Right, all of them are arse-holes. Save for my boy. I would have raised him better, if I'd had the chance. But that stupid Voldemort took that away from me. Every single man I ever knew screwed me over and then threw me away. Even after I died they keep at it," She sobbed loudly: "Now it is my boy who's going to be laughed at for having hand-me-down glasses, because my sister Petunia always hated me and she isn't taking good care of him! My poor baby!"

"There, there Lily. Here, have another drink. It'll make it all better. Do you want to sing some'ore?" Without waiting for an answer, she launched into a blood curling rendition of _Why Don't You Do Right?_

Lily Evans Potter hiccuped and replied in an inebriated voice: "As much as I've come to appreciate the talent of Miss Peggy Lee, Myrtle, why don't we try singing something else this time?"

"Like what? _Somebody Else Is Taking My Place_ is really good too," came the whinny response.

"I'm thinking of something else. Do you remember Frank Sinatra?"

Myrtle denied: "No darling that was after my time. But I do remember we got some bobby soxers infatuated with the man here a few years after I died. They were so obnoxious with their fainting and their screeching, so much that they could make house milk curdle. That's how we called the powdered milk we Muggles and Muggle born got during the war. That was the only good thing here, the food. They got everything, eggs, bread, and even real butter and thought nothing of it. Self-entitled little brats! If you asked the boys and girls here it was as if the World War II didn't happen at all. It was all Grindelwald this and Grindelwald that. I bet if it hadn't been for the bombings my parents would have let me go back to London after that shitty first year." She moaned: "I hated everything and everyone here and everyone hated me back. But my parents thought I'd be safer in Hogwarts. Hah! I wasn't. I died and it took these people so long to notice because no one cared a bloody whit about me."

"There, there, Myrtle, have another drink. It really does help. Going back to Frank Sinatra. When I was six or seven, I don't remember right now, his daughter Nancy had this song on the Muggle radio. It really captures how I feel right now. Want to try it?" There was no verbal reply but Myrtle must have agreed, so Lily went on: "It goes something like this," she cleared her throat: "You go: _Dang, dang, dang, dang, dang, dang." _She said keeping the tempo snapping her fingers loud enough for Snape to hear it through the door. Then she slurred in a preternaturally loud voice: "And I go:_ tara-ran, tara-ran, tara-ran, tara-ran. _Then we both sing the chorus:_ these boots are made for walking and that is just what they'll do, one of these days these boots are gonna walk all over you! _Then you go back to the: _dang, dang _and I'll do the _tara-ran, tara-ran_. And then I'll sing the first verse."

Severus felt like banging his head against the wall and thought: "What fresh hell…?" He cracked the door open and poked in. Lily Evans' ghost was go-go dancing in a tight sweater and an indecently diminutive shorts with a pimply girl ghost who was wearing old-fashioned glasses and an ill-fitting Ravenclaw uniform. They were singing in canon. And yes, they both appeared to be pissed blind. Bloody hell! The little ghost looked fourteen tops. Not that it really mattered, because she could be a hundred years old. Going by the uniform and her blabber, Severus guessed she'd died before 1945.

Lily went into the first verse with venomous enthusiasm: "_You keep saying you got something for me, something you call love, but confess..._"

He closed the door back quietly. It was bad, really bad. Where had that imbecile Fat Friar gotten Firewhiskey ghosts could drink? Probably from a painting. Some of them had less than edifying subjects. But, of course, his real problem wasn't that. Leave it to Evans to have the first ghost drunken man-haters support group in Hogwarts. He had ignored Lily all summer and when she had stopped coming to him, he had figured out the wish spell had finally worn off. He felt mostly relieved, with just a hint of disappointment. It was obvious both feelings had been premature. He pinched his hooked nose between the tips of his fingers in quiet desperation. He'd wished he could just walk away from the bloody mess inside that lavatory, but that wasn't a choice. He had to go in and sort it out before someone else noticed what was going on. He first needed to figure out how he was going to handle it with as little carnage as possible.

And he would have, if the Head Girl, Delia Alistair, hadn't walked on him nearly giving him a heart attack. You couldn't have guessed it by his impassible face, but inwardly he was screaming bloody murder. As if having to deal with the drunk ghosts wasn't bad enough, he had to deal with the lovestruck pup that had been following him since the term had started too. This was no fresh hell, it was the same old, same old he'd faced his whole accursed life: caught between a rock and a hard place.

Delia Alistair looked at Professor Snape with adoring eyes. She had a deep admiration for the man, who rumor had it had been a double agent during the war. He was very close to Dumbledore and hadn't been sent to Azkaban, which seemed to confirm it. And he was orders of magnitude better than the last pompous Potions Master they'd had during first and second year. Delia knew things were going to be different when on the very first day of her third year the somber young man had made them prepare the Standard Ingredient. Most people assumed that the complex mix of herbs that was required for a lot of potions to work was going to be available from the local apothecary. Not Professor Snape. He'd said he wouldn't let anyone leave his potions class without learning to make it from scratch. Despite his youth, Severus Snape was a Head of House committed to excellence, both personally and by making every single Slytherin be the very best they could be. Though his methods were rather harsh, he often got results from people others thought of as lost causes. A firm believer in aiding people reach their full potential, Delia couldn't help developing tender feelings for the young wizard.

People think Slytherins are all about shortcuts and cutting corners, even though Merlin had been one and that there were more Ministers from that house than from any other. Cutting corners may aid but you cannot get and stay in the top unless you have something more than tricks in your bag. Not only Hufflepuffs are hard workers and not only Gryffindors are brave. And those houses are not the only honorable ones. Meeting a Slytherin who always acted straight as an arrow and held everyone accountable to the highest standard had been a life changing experience for Delia.

Ambition is not a four letters word, it can take you places others don't dare go, as long as you are the one holding the reins of your ambition and not the other way around. A lot of people don't have a firm grip over their impulses, but a really good Slytherin does. Granted, some of the places ambition took you were dark, but real heroes don't find their quests where the light dwells. And the greatest of them, like Merlin, walked the path of greatness in the gray. It took real strength to do that without going dark.

Delia was strong willed. She was a halfer, her dad was a wizard and her mum had no magic whatsoever. Unless making a wicked shepherd pie and having eyes behind her back to watch over her daughter counted as magic. Her parents were good people who had raised a go-getter who was not a hothead, hence she was sorted in Slytherin. Delia Alistair had a fine leveled head over her broad shoulders. Not only Ravenclaws are clever. Though she knew just how clever Ravenclasws can be, for her dad was one. That is why she was not deluded, it was clear to her Severus Snape did not and would never reciprocate her feelings. But she just couldn't help having them. And she had decided earlier this term that, though she was going to try not to shove them in the man's face, she was not going to be ashamed of them either.

"What are you doing out of the common room, Miss Alistair? It is well past curfew."

Once more she troubled her thin lips, like she did whenever she was unsure of doing the right thing: "I'm sorry Professor Snape, but Alice Selwyn mentioned there was a ghost commotion in the bathroom and I thought you may need some help sorting it out. Not that I'm saying you couldn't handle it on your own, but you may care for some help..."

Her voice trailed off and she messed her short dark blond hair, self-conscious. She was four and a half inches taller than him and she knew that sometimes blokes saw that as a personal affront, especially when she acted in ways they didn't think were girly. Of usual she thought that their small-minded concept of feminine was their problem, not hers. But she was going to have to work on better ways of dealing with it, if she was going to join the Aurors. There are women Aurors, but most of them are guys, especially in the higher ranks of the rapid reaction task forces, which was where her ambition was aiming for. You've got to get the lads on your side, if they are going to follow your orders in combat, especially when a second's hesitation is the difference between life and death for the squad.

She had the grades for it. And being the Slytherin's Quidditch team captain for four years in a row had been a useful experience dealing with the boy's club mentality. But she still had things to learn, as the near fall out with her best friend last year showed. Will was the team's seeker, Slytherin's other Prefect and her best mate since childhood. They had quarreled over her saving him from getting his face crushed by a wild Bludger. It had been pure instinct, she'd acted without thinking. But Will had felt humiliated because she had missed a clear chance to score throwing one of the Quaffles at a Bludger to save her friend's ungrateful arse.

It had been the hooting and the booing from the Slytherin's stands that had alerted Will to the fact that something was wrong. Unlike some of her housemates, Delia did not believe in winning at all cost. She was telling the bleacher haters to chill -for Merlin's sake, they were fifty points up- when Madam Hooch menaced with fouling her for flying into the scoring area without a Quaffle.

What had made it all worse was that Will had fallen while he was bickering at her, saying that he could take care of himself and that she should have let Jeffrey and Mordecai, the beaters, do their job and focus on doing hers as the best bloody chaser they had. Slytherin's star seeker was so distracted raving that he had lost his balance and plunged down like a sack of potatoes. Once more she had reacted with little thought involved and the boy was saved by her picking him up, in what an apoplectic red Will had called a princely manner. Again, all she'd wanted was to prevent him from crashing to the ground like an overripe squash.

He'd said that he couldn't believe she was that dumb. And that was the least insulting thing he'd shouted at her over the roaring laughter that was shaking the bleachers of both teams at the sight of them floating slowly down in one broom with him in her arms. Even some teachers and the barmy Head Master had laughed. Not Professor Snape and Delia thanked him for that from the bottom of her heart. Will had pushed her away and fallen the last 2 feet down ordering her to stay the fuck away from him.

She had been chasing after him on the ground when the Ravenclaw's seeker got the Snitch and ended the match. What a beastly match that had been. It nearly cost them the House Cup. And Delia and Will had been the butt of the joke for the next few weeks. Right until the bloke who'd fallen over Leucrotta's droppings during Creatures Care had replaced them as the school's gossip darlings.

After the fact Delia had realized that she had played the prince and Will the damsel in distress and that had been the issue. To be fair, she would have tried to save any of her teammates. And, despite popular belief, Will was not a useless wimp. He had been casting _Levicorpus_ at the same time Delia caught him before thinking. But no one else had heard him cast and she'd only heard him when it was too late. It was not really Delia's fault that Will was smaller than her and that he seemed to fit right in her arms in a way sexist arse-holes found funny. Besides, she still thought she'd done the right thing. At least at first. The beaters were too far away and he had been distracted looking for the Snitch. Sorry, but she wasn't going to let her best mate get hurt just so he could save face.

They both acknowledged their divergent opinions on the incident and were patching things up, slowly. It had been a rocky road. Over the summer break they had only seen each other when they met with common friends. And Will had showed up to the first day of school with a buzz cut and a scruffy goatee. He used to love what he'd called his hard rock raven black mane and he'd hated his Uncle Dan's goatee, having once said goatees were the lamest kind of facial hair. When she had tried to address it, he had curtly told her to mind her own business. And when she'd looked back at him hurt, he'd told her she had to try to understand where he stood, she might not care what other people thought of her, but he did. They shouted it out, cried a bit and then made up. Things got better from there, because they both were very careful to circle around the incident. Since that day Delia was burnt shy, second guessing things she'd never seriously thought about before. Like offering help to a teacher.

Just then Lily and Myrtle interrupted her musings by bellowing: "_I just found me a brand new box of matches. Yeah. And what he knows you ain't have time to learn!_" Making Delia look at the bathroom door wide-eyed and Severus Snape moan inwardly.

"Are those really ghosts? They sound like Peeves. What on Merlin's name is going on in there?!"

Severus Snape was unfazed by her height. He looked up at her and said steadily: "What is going on in there is nothing for you to worry about, Miss Alistair. Please head back to the Slytherin Dungeon and, if you really want to be of service, make sure everyone is in there and that they stay in."

The war cry of "_Are you ready boots?_" preceded the sound of heavy stomping.

Delia looked at the closed door hesitant: "Are they marching? Can ghosts do that? I've always seen them float. I hadn't realized they could march..." And when it became obvious he wasn't going to contribute to that conversation, she reported dutifully: "Will and I have already done the row call and everyone is accounted for, Professor Snape. Are you absolutely sure I can't be of help to you?"

Severus stifled a sigh: "I'm sure. Don't you Quidditch chaps have practice early morning? You should head back and go to bed. I'll be there to close the dungeon presently. I'll check the protective spells when I'm done here."

The ghosts were bellowing: "_Dang, dang, dang, dang, dang, dang." "Tara-ran, tara-ran, tara-ran, tara-ran."_

Looking wearily at the bathroom door, Delia offered, still trying to be helpful: "I could check the spells in the entrance and the emergency exit, make sure the pipes are going just one way and check the pressure spells on the portholes are holding well. I'm good at diagnosing and casting protective charms."

The stomping got worse as the ghosts sang the chorus.

Severus decided he had to remove the girl from the premises. He tried a different approach. It was hard to be encouraging without getting the girl's hopes up. He answered in a deadpan: "That will be helpful, thank you." She beamed and he scowled as he ordered haughtily: "Now leave me…" When she flinched he softened the rebuke: "Please."

Delia threw him one last longing look before heading back. There was a deep sadness in the man's soulful dark eyes and something inside her wished that she had the power to make it better. But she knew she didn't, so she checked the spells, put the fairy lights to sleep and went to bed in the watery green penumbra of a Slytherin girls' bedroom. Before closing her eyes, she hoped that someday she'd become the kind of witch who could do something about those sad eyes.

After thinking it through Severus Snape decided to go with the direct approach. With one flick of his hand the door swung wide open and he entered the bathroom looking menacing. So much so that the little girl ghost screeched.

He took advantage of that and growled at her in a low voice: "You, go. Now." And the girly ghost disappeared through one of the toilette bowls, her combativeness all but gone.

Lily Evans Potter looked at him with drunken anger: "What the fuck? Who the bloody hell do you think you are to boss me and my friends around?"

That made him snap. He started in a muted voice and then went up, his voice going louder and louder, so when he reached the end of his tirade, he was bellowing: "Who do I think I am? I am Severus Snape, Head of House Slytherin, Hogwarts Potions Master. I'm charged with guarding this dungeon. And you, you are nothing but a bad memory. You are a nuisance, making a fool of yourself, getting blind drunk in front of the students with that pathetic girl ghost! So you'd better follow your craven little friend's example and get the hell out of here before my patience runs out and I finally decide to exorcise you!"

The ghost of Lily looked at him unblinking and then she did something he'd never expected her to do. She started crying. In between ragged sobs she moaned: "You are mean, Sev. Why are you being so mean to me? You never were mean like this before!"

She curled up in a ball on the bathroom floor and Severus went to sit down in front of her, his back to the wall. She bawled for a good five minutes before she calmed down a bit, sobbing softly and hiccuping.

He sighed, leaning his head back: "Blimey, Evans, when did you become such a wimp?"

She sniggered: "I've always been this way. You never noticed before, no one did. You people all looked at me and saw just what you wanted to see, none of you people saw me, the real me, not even once."

"Us people?"

She sniffled, even though ghosts are not supposed to have snots: "All of you. Did you know my grandparents on both sides were squibs? They could only marry Muggles and they were disappointed none of their children had magic. So when I was four and mum and dad found out I did have magic, they were so happy… So happy… And that's when it started. From that day onwards whenever they looked at me they no longer saw Lily. I became all their unfulfilled dreams, two generations worth of them, lumped up in the body of a tiny girl. They had such high hopes for me and I was so afraid of disappointing them… I was terrified. And then there was Tuny, she was six at the time and she became the invisible girl who was neither pretty, nor smart, nor magical. The day I cast my first spell I made my sister disappear. Not literally, I think my first spell had something to do with flowers, I don't really remember. But I do remember how Petunia used to be before that happened. She was such an affectionate girl, always looking out for me. But around the time mum and dad started focusing all their attention on me something went crooked inside her. Being inconsequential turned her sour, her face became twisted in that permanent scowl of disgust she has to this day and all her warmth evaporated. She blamed me and I can't argue with her on that. But what was I supposed to do? I couldn't do away with magic and I couldn't say to mum and dad that I wanted things to go back to how they had been before. Isn't it funny? All their childhood mum and dad suffered from my grandparents' disappointment at their lack of magic and they went and did the same thing to their daughter."

She laughed sourly, Severus didn't. It wasn't funny at all. Another reason why worlds shouldn't mix.

"I don't think that is how they meant things to be, but that is how things were. And then there was you. You were the only kid in town that would get close to me. There were rumors about me being a freak. A lot of them came from Petunia. And mum and dad made me stay in the house most of the time, save to go to school because even if they weren't magical they were weary of people hurting me, if they found out who I really was. I tried to be as normal as I could. And then you saw me doing some magic and you were elated to have someone like you around. I wasn't trying to do anything, but sometimes I couldn't control it. You could. You could make things happen at will, you showed me how and you made it seem so simple. You think you felt in love with me back then, but I've always known the truth is that you loved magic so much that of course you ended up falling for the only magical girl that was around. It could have been anyone. I had started hating magic, but I was caught up in expectations mum's and dad's and yours… It was a tangle I couldn't escape. I would have had to be stronger and braver than I was to be able to do so. And you were so smart and magic came so easily to you. You had so many books on it and you could explain them so easily, even those that didn't really made sense to me. I thought it was in my best interest to stay close to you. And you thought you and me were the same when we weren't. I was a little coward, always scared shitless of failing, trying to be the Lily everyone else wanted me to be."

"But you were such a gifted witch," he protested.

She sat leaning on the wall opposite to him: "No I wasn't. What you could learn after reading a book once took me several days to learn. But I persevered because I knew the day would come that I was going to Hogwarts and I didn't want to fail. I tried to follow you, but you were so curious and truly gifted and I felt exhausted most of the time trying to catch up to you. And I was relieved once we got to school and I found out that other magical children weren't like you. I wouldn't have been able to measure up if they had been. Did you know that I wanted to be sorted in Hufflepuff?"

He drew his knees to his chest and denied moving his head from side to side.

"The Sorting Hat said that houses weren't always about what you are, but about what you can become. I wasn't brave at all, but I was afraid that if I protested I would be asked to leave."

He scoffed: "Nonsense, once your name is written in the Book of Admittance you are in, the sorting is a mere formality. The important thing is to get the letter, everyone knows it."

She chuckled mirthlessly: "I didn't, not back then at least. You knew though, just like you knew you were going to be sorted in Slytherin, without a single doubt in your mind."

He sighed: "My confidence was just a pose. All I had were hopes and vague ambitions, not certainties."

"See, we are nothing alike, I didn't even have hopes or ambitions to drive me, all I had was fear. But you only saw in me what you wanted to see. It was the same with the people at school. I had been sorted in Gryffindor and everyone saw a Gryffindor in me, even though I felt I never quite fitted in."

He smirked: "Not fitting in with the Gryffindors doesn't sound so bad, if you ask me."

"Yes, you hated the Gryffindors. Have you ever wondered why did I chose James Potter?"

It was his turn to chuckle without humor: "Endlessly."

"Do you remember 1976 through 1977? In less than a year mum and dad died, Petunia went to London and got herself a job, a boyfriend, a life that did not include me. And you, you started hanging out with those Death Eater creeps. All of the sudden there was no one left to disappoint. I felt so empty and resentful. I had spent sixteen years trying so hard to be what you people had told me to be and then you all abandoned me. I was aimless and James was there, he was easy going, undemanding and a good catch. It was so easy to be the version of Lily he wanted me to be. And there were always people around us, telling us that we were such a nice couple. He was more like you than I ever was, Sev. He was sure we were meant to be without a single doubt in his mind. And it was easier to go along with all that than it was trying to figure out how to fill the empty vessel I had become."

He leaned towards her "Are you real or is this the wish spell messing up with my head?"

She shrugged: "Feels real to me. Don't get me wrong, I loved James, he was the knight in shining armor come to save me, or at least he was really good at pretending he was. And after his own fashion he really loved me. I'd never experienced a love so undemanding and it felt good."

"So he didn't ask anything of you and you fell for him because of that? Altruistic is not a word I'd use to describe James Potter, but perhaps he was different with you."

"Not really, let me try to explain it. James Potter was the hero of his own tale. He had a narrative going on endlessly inside his head. Merlin, he was so sure that he deserved everything life had given him. His friends, his girlfriend, his racing broom, his family's galleons, all that was a gift from life meant just for James Potter. And of course Lily Evans, the prettiest, smartest Gryffindor girl was just part of the package that the hero of the movie deserved and even though I felt really repulsed by that confidence of his at first, he never doubted that I would come around. And he toned it down a bit, so that helped too..."

"That is a biggest load of bollocks I'd ever heard. Being around Death Eaters I've heard some."

"I won't argue you that. But being with him and his friends was a thousand times better than being in an empty house in Cokeworth with the ghosts of my parents and the lumbering feeling that I was going to end up being a failure. I went through my O.W.L.S and N.E.W.T.S not really knowing what I wanted to do after Hogwarts. I'd never thought beyond graduation and the people telling me what to do weren't around anymore. There were added perks too. James' parents were an old couple that welcomed me as if I were their daughter. And James and his friends were always in the middle of something fun. As long as I was James Potter's girl, I didn't really have to think about things like who I was or what I wanted to do with my life. I could just let myself be a supporting character in The Great Story of James Potter. As barmy as it sounds, being his gave me a sense of belonging and purpose."

He was crazy just for asking, but just on the off chance there was something more to it than the wish spell, he did: "Why not being the girl in Severus Snape's story?"

She sighed: "For once because you never asked. Even after what happened during my mum's funeral we kept drifting apart. Second because the Lily Evans you wanted me to be was exactly the one that I was trying to avoid back then. And third because the people you were with were bloody scary."

"No one knew about the Death Eaters back then, Lily Evans, you are getting your timeline wrong."

She scoffed: "They weren't scary because they were Death Eaters, Sev. Merlin's beard, you really don't get it, do you?"

"No I don't get it. Why would being with rowdy idiots was better than being with people that, granted, turned dark, but were refined, intelligent and driven?"

"Because James Potter's friends didn't make me feel like trash and yours did."

"Come off it, Lily Evans! James Potter's friends bullied me all my childhood and my friends never even mentioned you! Most had already left or where about to leave school by the time you got there."

"For someone so smart you can be really stupid sometimes, Sev. OK, bear with me, let me tell you a couple of anecdotes that may shed some light. One happened during our first year at Hogwarts: it was Valentine's Day and we first year Gryffindor girls were in the courtyard watching those third year and above going out on their dates. And that's when a carriage drawn by Pegasus came by to take one of the seventh years: Narcissa Black on a date with Lucius Malfoy to bloody Maxim's in Paris…"

He derided: "What is this obsession of yours with Paris?"

She hiccuped and kept it up until she drank water directly from the faucet. Better said, she tried to drink and the water went right through her. Still, it seemed to work. She was definitely not what he expected from a ghost.

She sniggered meanly: "It's not about Paris. It is about a girl that dresses up in a midnight blue and silver dress made out of actual cobwebs and Mooncalves skins, accessorized with Goblin's silver. It is about a girl that gets whisked away to Paris for Valentine as if it were nothing. It is about a girl that gets magically grown daffodils that bloom in the middle of February, for crying out loud! It is also about a boy who can afford to take his girl to Maxim's in a six Pegasus carriage. Did you know that I was gawking at them so intently that I tripped on my own feet and landed right in front of them?"

"No I didn't know. I've never really cared for Valentine's Day."

"That is so you. I never mentioned it to anyone. Laying there sprawled like a clumsy idiot was humiliating, but what came next was worse. Care to guess what happened?"

He sighed: "I don't know. Did they say something mean to you?"

"No they didn't say anything to me, they merely wrinkled their noses and sidestepped me as if I were a dog's dropping."

"I'm sure it wasn't personal, the Malfoys can be a bit intolerant, they seldom stumble or make mistakes, so they don't take kindly to people who do." He shrugged: "It is how they are."

"A bit intolerant? That is a gross understatement. Those two are a pair of arrogant tossers. And I'm positive it wasn't personal, because they didn't see me as a person at all."

"I don't think that is fair…"

"Let me finish, Sev. I'll make the next anecdote quick. This happened on late October of 1980. I had just had Harry and James was out with his friends in what he called Order of the Phoenix business. Who knows? It might have been true. It had been ten years since the war began and we had just gotten involved with the Order, but the way James and his friends acted you'd think they were really high up in it. I felt tired and overwhelmed, having to deal with a baby without really knowing how to. I could have talked to my mother in law and I'm sure she would have helped me. But that would have made me feel once more like a failure. I mean what kind of witch cannot handle taking care of a wee baby? The ever increasing grim news also made me feel scared most of the time. I just wasn't of the right frame of mind to keep up with casting _Scourgify_ on a dozen cloth nappies. By the second month after having Harry I had started using Muggle disposable ones. The evening this happened I had ran out. I didn't want to go to the local Muggle store for fear that some acquaintance would see me and they would judge me an unfit mother. I decided to go all the way to London to buy them."

"That makes no sense at all. I've never understood why you care so much about what people think and going all the way to London for nappies makes you sound like a nutter."

"I guess I wasn't really thinking straight. I think I was having postpartum depression, but I didn't really know what to do about it and no one around me noticed. I couldn't leave a two and a half months old baby alone. So I bundled up Harry really well against the cold, grabbed my coat and used the Floo to go to London. I arrived at Diagon Alley and, again I was a bit paranoid, so I walked down Strand to where I remembered having seen a store and somehow I found myself standing in front of Simpson's. I paused in front the grand entrance, wondering just what kind of people could afford to have their Sunday roast there, and that was when you and your wanker friends walked out."

"The Malfoys and the Lestranges liked to have lunch there."

"You were all dressed up in sharp clothes and I remember that there was an elf nanny trailing after Narcissa Malfoy with a pram heavily surrounded by look away spells. I only got a glance of a beautiful baby with silver blond hair sleeping all cozy. You were all so loud it was obvious you had drank quite a bit. It was too early for dinner, so I figured you had just finished a very long lunch. I was so mortified that I froze. I was wearing some old jeans and an even older coat, I was so different from the girls you were with that I could have been a different species. My head was in a messy bun, I had no make-up or glamors on and my nose was red from the cold. Rabastan Lestrange had his arm around your shoulders and was saying something laughing between teeth while that bitch Bella cackled loudly. You smirked and said something back that made everyone laugh. You looked so at ease with them, like you belonged. I was trying to order my legs to move and get out of there when you looked up. I felt like throwing up. I thought that you finding me there was the worst that could happen. But then you saw right through me, like I were nothing. A stupid Muggle woman that didn't merit a second look…"

Big droplets were running down her cheeks and Severus had to cross his arms to stop himself from hugging her. He muttered: "I remember having lunch there often, but I don't remember ever seeing you there."

She scoffed: "That's my point. You could only see in me what you wanted to see, but you couldn't really see me when I was being me. You and everyone else couldn't see me when I needed someone to see just how scared and tired of everything I was. No one could see me unless I was what they wanted to see. When you looked right through me it felt like being drenched with a bucket of ice cold water. So I was able to move and leave. I bought the nappies, went back to the Leaky Cauldron and then back home. I cried my heart out and when James came back and asked for dinner, I told him to go fix it himself. We had the worst fight we'd ever had since we started going out. The only good thing that came out of it was that his mum lent us her house elf. But it was only for a while, because pretty soon we had to go into hiding. Let me tell you, Sev, if that is how Petunia felt, no wonder she hates my guts. When you looked right through me I hated you, I hated you like I'd never hated anyone before."

"Do you want me to say that I'm sorry? I don't remember any of it. I was probably drunk on wine and on a foolish sense of triumph. If it helps you, it all went downhill from there. Those wankers, as you aptly call them, never were my friends. Under the best light we were accomplices and under the worst light we were just a bevy of gormless gits under the thrall of Tom Riddle. The Death Eaters were only means towards an end. Those stupid blood purist were afraid of losing their privileges when the squib protests started. And Riddle was using their prejudices to further his own agenda. Save for the brainwashed fanatics like the Lestranges, we were all judases just waiting to kiss each other in the cheek, before plunging in the knife."

"I'm not saying the Death Eaters weren't evil. I'm saying that they were privileged and smart, and somehow, despite coming from the same hole I did, you fitted right in."

"The Death Eaters were a bunch of murderous backward idiots. I'm not proud of my time with them."

"The fact is that you never did care what people thought of you but nevertheless the higher ups thought well of you. Everyone understood the pecking order. For the rest of us there was a glass ceiling we could never cross and you broke right through it, Sev. Do you remember Old Man Harry? He had worked in the ore mines until he got sick. He ended up being a bum who slept on the streets. He went around mumbling things, right until he died, coughing this black mix of soot and mucus. When we'd just arrived at Hogwarts I used to have a nightmare. I dreamt I was choking from within and the thing that came out of me was the same black thing that had killed Old Man Harry. You can take the girl out of Cokeworth but you can take Cokeworth out of the girl. I swear I'd never have picked up the name, if James hadn't been so set on calling the baby Harry, I would have named him anything but."

"But you got out of Cokeworth Lily Evans, you did. You had magic and a childhood friend who's never stopped thinking of you, and a husband who loved you and a baby that is still alive."

"That's about the only thing I did right in my life, my baby. That day with the nappies I swore that my boy wasn't going to end up like me. I swore that magic or not magic he was going to have the chance to choose who he will become and a chance to be happy. The fear that had accompanied me all my life was still there but for the first time it drove me to try to make things different. I was never more scared than when I faced Voldermort. But I guess the hat was not all wrong, because in that instant I knew that I wasn't going to let him take my baby away without a fight. So when you told me the arsehole is still alive and trying to hurt Harry, I thought I would stop at nothing to keep him safe. I know you don't want anything from me anymore and that I really have no right to ask you for anything, but please hear me out: if you ever did feel anything for me, for the real Lily Evans, please help me, please don't let my life and my death be in vain. I beg you, help me keep my baby safe."

He draw in a long breath: "Fine, I already felt responsible for your baby. If that is what is keeping you here, you don't have to worry about it. I won't let Voldemort hurt your Harry. I promise." He got up and helped her up: "And just for the record, I did see you. I saw your fear and how it never stopped you from moving onward. I saw how your parents hurt you and how the pain of it didn't make you crooked like it did Petunia. You are dead and you are still worrying about the sister that wouldn't give you the time of day and who is abusing your son as we speak. I see that too. I saw how despite your fear, you never hesitated to speak up against what you thought was unfair, even though no one thanked you for it. And I saw your dead body and in your face I saw your determination, when you knew you were going to die fighting for your baby. I saw all of you, the good and the bad and I would have taken it all in, if I'd only had the guts to ask. Whatever faults I'm really guilty of, I always saw you and it was you that I loved and that I love still. Perfection is overrated. I've seen my fair share of women of all kinds, but if you ask this Cokeworth boy, I'm still pretty much hung up on the same Cokeworth girl."

She tried to stand up and walk towards him, but she stumbled: "I think I'm too drunk to walk."

He smiled: "Then I shall carry you." He picked her up and left the bath walking towards his rooms.

_AN: __Thanks for the review and receive my apologies, oh Mother of Demons. I meant no offense. You are absolutely right in regards to my complete ignorance of anything related to demonology. You see, ma'am, I'm a skeptic and all my information on the subject of Lilith comes from fiction. Writers are known to take liberties and we amateurs are the worst of the lot. __T__he only thing I've read in regards to Hebraic myths is a book by Nehama Aschkenasy about the Hebraic literary tradition on womanhood called Eve's Journey. Chapter Two: Evil, Sex and the Demonic touches on the subject of Lilith and lilitu, which I think are attributed an Assyrian or Sumerian origin, my memory fails me. I must confess that I only read it to oblige a friend whom I was clumsily trying to woo… The things one does for lust…_

_To further assuage you, my Lily is only called succubus out of spite. Yes, my Snape is capable of that while still loving her to the end of his life. A good friend of mine was once under the thrall of one such Circe that can turn men into pigs at their feet by weaponizing sex. The girl was draining my friend's wallet and his will to live. Among our circle she was known as That Slut. Granted, that wasn't the wittiest moniker, but it fit her well. The worst part was that my friend eventually made it sound like a term of endearment. He was head over heels over her. Fortunately he was only her training piglet. We breathed easier when she finally dumped him and moved on to bigger prey. _

_Anyways, writing this fic I remembered my friend's experience and it crossed my mind that a man who speaks Latin may very well call the woman who has her pretty foot firmly over his proud neck a succuba. I mean the Middle Latin word that shares the root succubare with supine: which means to lay down. In the Middle Ages that was a way to refer to a lady who earned her living on her back. The reference to demons was secondary to that rather more vulgar usage. I beg your forgiveness. _

_If I were to look for a folk tale to explain this visitation, I'd go with one of my ancestral traditions: ladies dressed in white. I mean, she manifests in crossroads: between life and death after a funeral, between day and night in crimson twilight, at the crossroad of the dual carriageway I've made the entrance to Spinner's End, at the crossroad of decision in this chapter. She displays her… err… powers in the presence of water: the rain and the Cokeworth River, near the Black Lake, where I assume Snape rooms are, in the bathtub at Snape's home or in the bathroom with Moaning Myrtle. She is conjured by the blood in the locket and I'm keeping this M so let us leave the list of liquids at that._

_For me the leitmotif of Lily Potter's character both in canon and in this fic is thwarted motherhood, her boy lost her but she lost him too. And with him she lost her self, because her whole identity revolves around her motherhood. She is the mother of the chosen one and the only one who recognizes her as her own person: Lily Evans is Snape. Here is the catch; he only does it in as much as he is obsessed with her. Her resentment at his expectations of her remaining the passive object of his desire and the way she turns it against him, also falls neatly in with that legend. So yeah, if I'd had to choose, I'd choose a Cihuateteo one of the companions of the goddess Cihuacoátl. Unfortunately that legend is less widely known than the myth of Lilith, which is why I went for that instead._

_Oh, also, I go with the movie's uniform design because the plain black robe doesn't really work for me, or anyone really, most of us need some kind of tailoring to look good, and even a school uniform is far better than a black sack and a witch's hat in terms of fashion. Plus I like that the houses are readily identifiable in the movies._

_In any case, thank you all for reading and since we've discussed the matter of one of my ancestral traditions and since it took me until after the holidays to update…. I'll end by saying: Nimitsmaktilia ta nochi nokuajkualli tlanekili. That is Náhuatl for: My best wishes for all of you. Let this New Year 2020 end on a higher not than it has started. Cheers._


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